The Turk in Italy

Los Angeles Opera

(213) 972-8001

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The Los Angeles Opera has uncovered an obscure, 197-year-old gem, said Mark Swed in the Los Angeles Times. Written by a 22-year-old Gioachino Rossini, this rarely performed comic opera flopped in 1814 Italy and had never even had a Los Angeles production until this “witty, wonderful” staging by director Christof Loy was imported from Germany. Nineteenth-century Italians apparently didn’t appreciate its story about a visiting Turkish prince cuckolding a “too old and too rich” member of Naples’s elite. But a sex-farce premise that was both stale and offensive then feels “fast, light, and lyrical” here, in an updated Naples setting. Rossini’s music is “dazzling,” the principal characters harbor “near-Mozartean depth,” and their complicated romantic entanglements even touch on such timely issues as “immigration, racism, and sexual exploitation.”

While “all the principals are absolutely solid,” two performances stand out, said Todd McCarthy in The Hollywood Reporter. Paolo Gavanelli brings “booming old world gusto” to the role of the silly old man who has foolishly married a “southern Italian man-eater” in the Sophia Loren mold. Meanwhile, the “Georgian sensation” Nino Machaidze not only merits the carnal attentions of the prince and a jealous Italian stud, she takes the opera’s climactic aria and “knocks it out of the park.” If the Turk of the title had been played in a more “buffoonish” spirit, the comedy might have been uproarious and the whole production might have graduated from “sparkling” to “scintillating.” Even so, sparkling’s not bad.