Opening the 38th edition of the Rossini Opera Festival will be Gioachino Rossini’s Le Siège de Corinthe – tragédie lyrique in three acts, with libretto by Luigi Balocchi and Alexandre Soumet. The new critical edition, published by Fondazione Rossini and edited by Damien Colas, premieres August 10 at the Adriatic Arena, with repeat performances scheduled for August 13-16-19. The new edition features the complete reconstructed score, which recovers the oldest layers of material hidden by the collettes and pages sewn together, for a total of 400 new bars of music. 
Much of the original version of the opera – which premiered on October 9, 1826 at the Académie Royale de Musique – remains to be discovered; still missing are the complete original manuscript and the copy from the Académie’s atelier de copistes. 

The production is directed by Carlus Padrissa and Lita Cabellut, from the Barcelona-based theater company La Fura dels Baus. The Rai National Symphony Orchestra performs for the first time in the city of Pesaro, conducted by Roberto Abbado. The cast includes Nino Machaidze, Luca Pisaroni, John Irvin, Sergey Romanovsky and Carlo Cigni, as well as new talents Xabier Anduaga, Iurii Samoilov and Cecilia Molinari from the Accademia Rossiniana.


LE SIÈGE DE CORINTHE, Tragédie lyrique by Gioachino Rossini
Direction, scenes and costumes: La Fura dels Baus (Carlus Padrissa Lita Cabellut)
Direttore: Roberto Abbado
Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della Rai
Coro del Teatro Ventidio Basso
Chorus Master: Giovanni Farina