War, Water, Environment: Le Siège de Corinthe opens the 2017 Rossini Opera Festival

2017 marks a watershed year in the history of the Rossini Opera Festival. The deaths of Alberto Zedda and Philip Gossett deprived the world of two leading figures of the so-called Rossini Renaissance. Zedda, in particular, was an institution in Pesaro: not only was he an indefatigable conductor and one of the finest interpreters of Rossini’s music; he was also the artistic director of the Festival and the founder of the Accademia Rossiniana, the Festival’s young artists’ program. Some of today’s leading Rossini singers graduated from it. A tribute to Zedda’s memory, the 2017 Rossini Opera Festival opened with a new production of Le siège de Corinthe, Rossini’s first opera for the Paris Académie Royale de Musique. An adaptation of his former Neapolitan opera Maometto II (1822), the opera was performed from Damien Colas’s new critical…