The Rossini Bicentennial Birthday Gala is a live album of operatic and sacred music by Gioachino Rossini, performed by Rockwell Blake, Craig Estep, Maria Fortuna, Thomas Hampson, George Hogan, Marilyn Horne, Kathleen Kuhlmann, Mimi Lerner, Chris Merritt, Jan Opalach, Samuel Ramey, Henry Runey, Frederica von Stade, Deborah Voigt, the Concert Chorale of New York and the Orchestra of St. Luke's under the direction of Sir Roger Norrington. It was released in 1993 as a 119-minute video album and in 1994 as a 78-minute CD.
Background
In 1992, New York City's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts hosted two gala concerts commemorating the two hundredth anniversary of Rossini's birth. The concerts were filmed for EMI Records, who edited the best of their footage into a video album that they released in 1993 on both VHS tape and twelve-inch Laserdisc. The following year, EMI issued most of the contents of their video album (arranged in a different running order) on CD: the omissions were the Overture to La gazza ladra, the quartet "Cielo il mio labbro inspira" from Bianca e Falliero, the trio "Pappataci! Che mai sento" from L'italiana in Algeri and the duet "Perché mi guardi" from Zelmira.
Recording
The album was compiled from recordings of concerts that took place on 29 February and 2 March 1992 in the Avery Fisher Hall at the Lincoln Center, New York City. The audio was recorded digitally.
Packaging
The covers of video and audio-only versions of the album feature photographs taken during the concerts at which the recording was made.
Critical reception
Barrymore Laurence Scherer reviewed one of the concerts from which the album was derived in Gramophone in May 1992. The singer whose contribution he enjoyed most was Marilyn Horne, who performed not only "Mura felici" from La donna del lago but also a "Di tanti palpiti" that was to have been sung by an indisposed June Anderson. She was not as miraculous as in her prime. but "if steel [had] replaced the former velvet of Horne's tone, her passagework [remained] undiminished in splendour." The runners-up for the palm of the evening were Thomas Hampson with his "delectable" if somewhat over-familiar "Largo al factotum" from Il barbiere di Siviglia, Deborah Voigt in the "Inflammatus" from the Stabat mater and Kathleen Kuhlmann in the "Agnus Dei" from the Petite messe solennelle. His view of some of the gala's other artists was harsher. Chris Merritt sang "Asile hérédetaire" from Guillaume Tell with "insensitivity to phrase and colour, merely treating the music as a build-up for a series of high notes that sounded like blood squeezed from a stone." As for Rockwell Blake, "his grotesque rendition of 'Terra amica, ove respire' from Zelmira provided a series of bleats and squawks that were a travesty of bel canto." The concert's opening number, the overture to La gazza ladra, was disappointing too, omitting its customary cymbals in order to achieve a "bloodless correctitude in the eyes of modern scholarship". It seemed to Scherer that Rossini's music had become an industry, in thrall to academia, in which all that mattered was that more and more of his scores should be performed. Whether his music was sung beautifully or wretchedly had ceased to be important.