Metropolitan Opera broadcasts continue on Classical 90.5 at 11:00 a.m. this Saturday, December 19, with a performance of La Donna del Lago by Gioachino Rossini, set to a libretto by Andrea Leone Tottola based on the French translation of The Lady of the Lake, a narrative poem written in 1810 by Sir Walter Scott. The performance will be sung in Italian and will run approximately three hours and twenty minutes. Michele Mariotti conducts.
Featuring one of Rossini’s most beautiful and expressive scores, La Donna del Lago was the first opera by a major composer to be based on the works of Sir Walter Scott, whose literary imagination would become hugely influential in the emerging Romantic era. An instant success at the time, the opera disappeared from the stage in the mid-19th century, along with many other works of the period, and has only recently been rediscovered with the resurgence of interest in bel canto.
The story takes place in Scotland in the first half of the 16th century, during the reign of King James V (the father of Mary Stuart), who is anecdotally said to have traveled throughout his kingdom in disguise as a commoner. His reign was filled with civil strife and war with neighboring England. The Scotland of the 19th-century Romantics’ imagination was a wild land where the usual rules of decorum didn’t apply, an imaginary place that was to inspire generations of artists and musicians.
THE CAST
Elena: Joyce DiDonato
Malcolm Groeme: Daniela Barcellona
Giacomo V: Lawrence Brownlee
Rodrigo Di Dhu: John Osborn
Duglas D'Angus: Oren Gradus
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