Podcast: Don Pasquale
This episode of our podcast explores Donizetti's comic opera, Don Pasquale
Peggy Reynolds explores Gaetano Donizetti’s Don Pasquale. With expert insights from conductor, Sir Mark Elder, who argues that Don Pasquale is “a brilliant refilling of an old mould”. From Francesco Izzo, Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Southampton, who sets the opera into the wider historical context of the development of opera buffa, arguing that Don Pasquale was a new kind of comic opera, one which treats its characters with great empathy and warmth. From Glyndebourne’s dramaturg, Cori Ellison, on the origins of the Basso Buffo character in Italian commedia dell’arte and Donizetti’s use of the waltz as a signifier for youth throughout the opera. And from Danielle de Niese, who introduces us to Norina, the opera’s feisty heroine and considers the moral of the story.
Producer: Mair Bosworth for Festival 2013
(Musical extracts used with kind permission of Decca Classics)
