The Turk in Italy (Il Turco in Italia)

Synopsis

Rossini's 1814 comic opera reversed the idea of The Italian in Algiers. Prosdocimo believes that adding a Turkish element into his new comedy would be advantageous and decides to engineer a complicated intrigue between Fiorilla, her worried husband Geroinio and the Turk Selim.

Our Review:

4 April 2010

Il Turco in Italia has always tended to live in the shadow of the more frequently performed L’Italiana and it is perhaps easy to understand. The plot device of the hopeless dramatist Proscodimo playing puppet-master may pre-figure Pirandello by a century but can easily wear thin.

In this revival of Caurier and Leiser’s production (originally premiered with Bartoli) there is occasionally a feel that the directors do not entirely trust the material and some scenes have become over-larded with (many admittedly very funny) sight gags. One particularly hilarious one involving a split palm tree is too gleefully obscene to be retold on a family website! Caurier and Leiser also indulge one of their more tiresome directorial tics by “dragging up” half the male chorus.

The cast was a strong, if not overtly, starry one and for me the peach was Alessandro Corbelli’s Don Geronio. Artificially fattened up and resembling nothing so much as the ill...

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