'La Cenerentola' succeeds as light, animated comedy

An increased delight in the music of Gioachino Rossini is one of the rewards of growing older. Serious young listeners tend to want heavy meaning, big emotion and Mahlerian metaphysics from their entertainments and might dismiss a resolutely cheery, determinedly hedonist comic opera such as "La Cenerentola" as fluff. And so it is — but brilliant fluff, animated throughout by sheer joy in the sublime and silly mystery of being alive.

If you're in search of cosmic angst or a dark sermon on the follies of humankind, "La Cenerentola" might not be your opera. If, on the other hand, you prefer to commune with a host who long ago accepted the tragic aspects of our temporal existence (with appropriate and heartfelt regret) but, while we're all still around, will serve good food and choice wine, surround you with civilized and attractive company, allow you to acquaint yourself with young lovers who are just in the process of finding each other, all to a musical accompaniment that is unfailingly stylish and pleasurable, try to get to the Spoleto Festival USA's current production of "Cenerentola" at the Galliard Auditorium. There's always a party at Chez Rossini.

The composer tossed off this wonderful score in three weeks and — no slight intended — it sounds that way. Fizzy, dizzy, joyfully secular and seemingly effortless, "Cenerentola" is the least pompous of masterpieces and inevitably leaves a spectator happy and satisfied.

It helps that Spoleto has provided an appropriately cracked staging, directed by Charles Roubaud with sets by Emmanuelle Favre and costumes by Katia Duflot. At first, it seems downright old-fashioned, with its formal portraits and painted lawns. But then it goes bewitchingly off-course, with crazy films and images interpolated when one least expects them.

Most Rossini operas have at least one storm in them: The filmed twister included here reminds me of Judy Garland and Auntie Em — I half expected Margaret Hamilton to fly by on a broomstick.

Moreover, most of the performances were shockingly good. Jennifer Check and Laura Vlasak Nolen, as the two wicked stepsisters ("Cenerentola" is Rossini's idiosyncratic take on "Cinderella") managed to be malevolent, grotesque and very funny, all the time singing with dulcet sweetness and precisely in tune. Sandra Piques Eddy, in the title role, has a somewhat smaller and less opulent voice but employed it with agility and skill. What marvelous wish fulfillment this opera offers — no matter how bedraggled you are, Rossini assures us, a beauty lies beneath and you will get to "show" your uncomprehending family and small-minded townspeople, all the while claiming a handsome prince as your mate!

The tenor who sang the role of Don Ramiro, the disguised prince, was Victor Ryan Robertson, a dashing figure who had some difficulty being heard in forte passages. No such problem faced Timothy Nolen, an indelible Don Magnifico, or Paolo Pecchioli, as Alidoro, who raced his way through what might be called the composer's patter songs (Gilbert and Sullivan would have been unimaginable without Rossini's influence) with woolly aplomb. Bruno Taddia made a witty and effective Dandini, Sancho Panza to Ramiro's Don Quixote.

There were minor calamities aplenty on opening night, ranging from a wall of cooking utensils that descended clatteringly on a moving fireplace (you had to be there) to the cast's inability to keep up with the conductor Matteo Beltrami's headlong pace in the Act I finale. Indeed, this was probably the fastest rendition I've ever heard of this music; if such a tempo can work, so be it, but conductor and orchestra left much of the cast in the dust. Aside from this blemish, Beltrami seemed a natural Rossinian, letting the melodies spin out with requisite wit and elegance while giving the composer's ... well, his sheer craziness its amazing due.

Because of a long-standing cultural tendency to equate seriousness with profundity, we have only begun to take the full measure of Rossini.

For me, he is among the greatest of all musical geniuses — a unique and universal master who is simply not to be spoken of in the same breath as Donizetti and Bellini, the two very fine contemporaries to whom he is so often compared.

No other creator could have invented the first-act finale of Rossini's "L'Italiana in Algeri," for example, when the action spins gloriously out of control and language is no longer sufficient to express the loopy feelings of the characters, who are reduced to rapid-fire onomatopoeia — "ding! ding!" and "cra! cra!" and "tac! tac!" and that perennial favorite "boom boom boom boom boom boom boom!" If the Three Stooges' Curly had written an opera libretto, it might have gone something like this. It is Dada 100 years before Dada was invented. But it is better than Dada, for it is less an easy mockery of convention than the construction of a gleeful parallel universe, one stocked with indelible tunes.

A similar passage occurs late in Act II of "Cenerentola," in which the characters all comically roll their r's and slither up and down the scale as though they've lost both their minds and their gravity. And then there is the celebrated Rossini crescendo — a melody repeated three times over, with increased volume and intensity as it grows, a gesture both comfortably predictable and ever new.

In his vast, apocalyptic novel, "Gravity's Rainbow," the novelist Thomas Pynchon casts a cold eye on much of Western civilization but inevitably exempts Rossini, whom he considers "full of light and kindness."

"With Rossini, the whole point is that lovers always get together, isolation is overcome, and like it or not that is the one great centripetal movement of the World," Pynchon observes. "Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs."

This is something to be thankful for at all times, but it is especially welcome in the summer of 2008. There will be two more performances of "Cenerentola," on Friday night and June 6. Tickets are still available.

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