Thousands of music enthusiasts are drawn each year to the Schwetzingen Festival in the time-honored walls of the beautiful Rokokotheater, an ideal place for Rossini's farse, his light one-act operas from the early part of his career. These operas already contain all the elements with which Rossini later took the music world by storm: melodic inventiveness, ingenious connections between sung lines and orchestral accompaniment, musical humor and emsembles using breathtakingly fast parlando singing. The witty and ironical relaization of these musical comedies by Michael Hampe and conductor Gianluigi Gelmetti with a great ensemble of singers was met with enthusiastic approval and makes the present recordings milestones in the still young Rossini videography and the very rare productions in this genre.

The central facts of this brilliant performance are the conductor's vision and energy, expressed through a virtuoso orchestra and a cast carefully selected for theatrical as well as musical skills. The feeling of unrelenting pressure in the music seems to be an externalization of Don Giovanni's compulsions, which are only thinly veiled by his aristocratic manner and Mozart's mellifluous but intensely dramatic music. Riccardo Muti's tempos are often fast, but not so fast as to interfere with the fine nuances of dramatic expression in the orchestra and the singers, and he makes the gritty realities underlying the often smooth surface of the words and music intensely clear at every point.

This is a reissue of a recording that was previously issued by Nuova Era and Mondo Musica. It allows us to hear Marilyn Horne in one of her signature roles, and it was presumably for her that this production was mounted at Venice’s La Fenice. Horne’s performance is what one would expect; she tosses off the coloratura with ease, and her performance is very assured. Her colleagues provide generally good support. Gasdia does not make as strong an impression as some of her recorded competition as Almirena, but her singing is technically assured.