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Rossini’s Silken Comedy Unravelled by Michieletto Pesaro
Teatro Rossini
08/13/2026 - & August 16, 19, 22, 2026
Gioachino Rossini: La scala di seta
Enrico Iviglia (Dormont), Hasmik Torosyan (Giulia), Mara Gaudenzi (Lucilla), Alasdair Kent (Dorvil), Iuri Samoilov (Blansac), Paolo Bordogna (Don Germano)
Orchestra del Teatro Comunale di Bologna, Iván López‑Reynoso (conductor)
Damiano Michieletto (stage director), Paolo Fantin (sets & costumes), Alessandro Carletti (lighting)
(© Ennevi Foto)
La scala di seta belongs to the group of one‑act farse with which the young composer established his reputation. Its plot—a clandestine marriage, an unsuspecting suitor, a meddlesome servant, an ineffectual guardian and a succession of concealments and misunderstandings—is hardly substantial. Yet Rossini’s musical imagination transforms this flimsy material into a remarkably sophisticated theatrical mechanism.
The work inevitably recalls Cimarosa’s Il matrimonio segreto, not least in its domestic setting, marital complications and gallery of comic types. But if Cimarosa’s masterpiece provided Rossini with an obvious point of departure, La scala di seta demonstrated how rapidly the young composer had moved beyond his predecessor. Its rhythmic vitality, extraordinary precision and almost geometric manipulation of ensemble make it a work of considerably greater theatrical ingenuity than its modest dimensions might suggest. What might easily have remained a minor farce instead becomes a miniature laboratory for the comic invention that would soon blossom in L’italiana in Algeri, Il barbiere di Siviglia and La Cenerentola.
The Pesaro production by Damiano Michieletto, with sets by his faithful collaborator Paolo Fantin, proved ideally suited to this extraordinary fusion of music and mechanism. It was precisely the kind of staging that makes one briefly forget one’s habitual reservations about fashionable directorial theatre. There was nothing arbitrary or gratuitously provocative here: every theatrical idea arose organically from Rossini’s music and from the logic of the farce. Ever since I saw his staging of Les Contes d’Hoffmann in Venice, I have become a fan of Michieletto. His stagings of Don Giovanni for Venice, Médée for La Scala, Rossini’s Otello for Frankfurt, Il barbiere di Siviglia for Paris, La Fille du regiment for Munichand Lohengrin for Rome are among the best stagings of these works.
Fantin conceived the stage as the full-scale floor plan of Giulia’s apartment, its rooms and furnishings marked out with almost architectural exactitude. The image inevitably recalled Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2003), while a huge mirror, inclined at forty‑five degrees above the stage, allowed the audience to observe the characters from above. The result was both ingenious and visually enchanting. At the beginning, furniture was brought on and positioned according to the plan; thereafter the apartment became a gigantic comic machine in which the characters moved from room to room, hid from one another, entered and exited, cooked, ate, drank, dressed and undressed, all without the conventional walls and doors that would normally define such a domestic environment.
Michieletto’s direction was nothing short of meticulous. Every gesture seemed calculated, every entrance precisely timed, every piece of business integrated into the musical rhythm. The characters might have little psychological depth—Rossini never intended them to—but they were given an almost balletic physical definition. Their frantic movements across Fantin’s geometric plan seemed to reproduce visually the quicksilver patterns of the score. The production therefore achieved something that is much harder than mere modernisation: it made the theatrical grammar of Rossini visible.
At the centre of this beautifully controlled chaos stood Paolo Bordogna’s Germano, a comic creation of exceptional brilliance. Michieletto turned the servant into something resembling Mr. Bean transplanted into a Rossinian farce, complete with an almost childlike attachment to a teddy bear. Yet Germano was not simply the production’s comic relief. Without ever becoming a deus ex machina, he emerged as its dramatic as well as comic centre, an increasingly active agent in the traffic of misunderstandings. Bordogna understood perfectly that such a role demanded more than a collection of comic effects: his every gesture, glance and vocal inflection contributed to the larger machinery of the production. The result was irresistible without ever becoming vulgar, and quintessentially Michieletto in its ability to find humanity beneath caricature.
Armenian soprano Hasmik Torosyan brought considerable vocal and theatrical brilliance to Giulia. Her stage presence was immediately commanding, while her impeccable legato allowed the lyrical passages to unfold with elegance. She negotiated Rossini’s coloratura with energy and assurance, and her upper register was generally bright and secure. Her aria, “Il mio ben sospiro e chiamo,” was particularly brilliant, confirming the impression of a singer thoroughly at home in Rossini’s demanding idiom.
Australian tenor Alasdair Kent, whom I heard last summer as Idreno in Semiramide in Paris and more recently as Belmonte in Turin’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail, managed much of Rossini’s coloratura but struggled with its demanding high tessitura. He proved far more effective as an actor, displaying remarkable physical agility and convincingly conveying both Dorvil’s passion for Giulia and his jealous nature. His voice, while pleasing in timbre, has a rather “white” quality that is less naturally suited to the warmth and flexibility required by Italian bel canto.
Italian mezzo-soprano Mara Gaudenzi, whom I heard as Fidalma in Il matrimonio segreto at La Scala in 2023, gave Lucilla a deliciously exaggerated comic profile, bringing out the character’s frustrated sensuality with considerable wit and natural comic verve. Endowed with natural comic verve, she was particularly appealing for her beautiful timbre and sensuous mezzo-soprano.
Belarusian baritone Iuri Samoilov was a richly voiced and warmly characterised Blansac, investing the role with vocal authority and spontaneous comic charm. His portrayal, with its hints of Don Giovanni, gave the unwanted suitor an especially amusing swagger. Enrico Iviglia completed the cast with a suitably hapless Dormont, the ineffectual guardian whose matrimonial schemes only add further complications to the already tangled plot.
Iván López-Reynoso conducted with considerable style, approaching Rossini not as an isolated phenomenon but as the culmination of a tradition that included both Mozart and Cimarosa. His reading brought out the eighteenth-century inheritance embedded in this youthful score while underscoring the remarkable speed with which Rossini transformed those comic conventions into something unmistakably his own.
La scala di seta may be slight in dramatic substance, but in Michieletto and Fantin’s hands its very slenderness became an advantage. Freed from the dusty conventions of an eighteenth-century salon, the work revealed itself as an exquisitely calibrated piece of musical theatre. Rossini’s youthful genius was everywhere apparent: already the music possessed the propulsion, precision and comic intelligence that would soon revolutionise Italian opera buffa.
Michieletto’s achievement was to recognise that the score required not embellishment but an equivalent theatrical intelligence. His production supplied it in abundance. And in Bordogna’s extraordinary Germano, Rossini’s comic universe acquired a servant who was at once clown, innocent, meddler and unlikely protagonist. The result was a La scala di seta that was not merely revived but genuinely rediscovered: a small work made to seem considerably larger by the sheer brilliance of its theatrical imagination.
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