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While Rossini was one of the first composers to assign heroic and romantic parts to the lower male voices, his first quintet of one-acters features invariably a romantic part for the tenor as the heroine's main love interest. In most cases he is a nice, simple lad, very similar to Nemorino in fact, leaving most of the meddling to the basses and the heroine. Only in "Il signor" we get Fioriville, a most assertive gentleman who, for once, creates all the chaos, while the basses and the soprano are left to watch everything unravel before their very eyes. Only "La cambiale" is different in the respect that the tenor is left completely without uninterrupted solo opportunities (a short arioso set right in the middle of the central terzet notwithstanding), while all other characters are given at least one aria. Usually, these arias are simple in both sentiment and structure: Fioriville gets a gentle romance; while in "L'occasione" and "La scala" the tenors have simple successions of cantabile - cabaletta. The sentiment is always the same: the hero's love to the soprano. The chosen piece, Bertrando's opening cavatina from "L'inganno" is a bit different: it's again sung on the theme of love, but instead of a simpler construction Rossini uses a multi-sectioned contrasting structure to fully detail the duke's unhappy mood (he thinks that his wife, Isabella, has been unfaithful to him). Here, the great Rossinian specialist, Raul Gimenez, enlivens the character of the duke wonderfully ... |
