L'Italiana in Algeri

Rossini's 1813 opera, generally regarded as his first comic masterpiece, receives an exuberant if also idiosyncratic mounting in this bicentennial 2013 staging at the Rossini Opera Festival in the composer's hometown of Pesaro. The libretto is fairly conventional: Mustafa, the Bey of Algiers, is tired of his wife Elvira, and wants a fiery Italian bride, but is ultimately tricked into being content by his conniving Italian slave Lindoro, and the latter's shipwrecked lover Isabella—whom Mustafa wishes to wed. The music, however, shows the effortless mastery of the composer's mature style, even though he was just 21 when he wrote it. José Ramón Encinar conducts a neat but relatively characterless reading of the score, and the singing is generally solid, with tenor Yijie Shi the standout as Lindoro, although the others—Alex Esposito as Mustafa, Mariangela Sicilia as Elvira, and Anna Goryachova as Isabella—aren't far behind. The odd setting is North Africa, which is crowded with oil rigs and barrels of crude, while the overall visual concept reflects a “swinging” 1960s style, with winking nods at James Bond and campy comic books, often expressed in animated backstage projections. It's a strange conceit that invites cheap gags and reduces Mustafa to even more of a stereotype. Still, while there are plenty of traditional versions available, this psychedelic re-imagining is pulled off with a reasonable degree of success. Presented in DTS 5.1 and Dolby Digital stereo on DVD, and DTS-HD 5.1 and LPCM stereo on Blu-ray, extras include a “making-of” featurette and a cast gallery. Recommended. (F. Swietek)