SAN DIEGO — That Rossini’s Il turco in Italia (1814) is performed far less often than his Il barbiere di Siviglia and La cenerentola is no reflection on its quality. Since Maria Callas helped to resurrect it in the 1950s, its reputation and staging frequency have steadily grown. This year alone it’s been mounted by Glyndebourne Festival and New York’s Teatro Nuovo, as well as by opera companies in Switzerland, Hamburg, and Tokyo.
Opera NEO, San Diego’s ever-enterprising hometown opera troupe, offered Il turco in another successful demonstration of its now 15-year-old playbook — lesser-known fare on period instruments delivered with creativity, panache, and a sense of fun — in the closing production of its 2026 summer season.
Rossini was only 22 and several years from Barbiere (1816) and Cenerentola (1817) when he composed Il turco, already in full stride as a composer of free-flowing melody. Why, then, has Peter Kozma, Opera NEO’s founder and artistic director, admitted to waiting two decades to present it? Quality wasn’t the issue. “This is not any less exciting or interesting or exuberant and entertaining a piece of music than Barber or Cenerentola,” he told me in April. “In fact, I think it’s one of his most amazing operas.”
The issue was finding the right approach, Kozma said. “‘Il turco in Italia suffers a little bit from awkwardness in the libretto. While the basic story is sweet and lighthearted and fun, the storytelling is a little bit confusing, and there are some twists and turns that require tender loving care.”
Rossini’s librettist, Felice Romani, held 19th-century notions about gender and “the other,” namely Selim, the dashing Turk of the title who parachutes into Naples on some kind of pleasure cruise, and the gypsies, among whom Selim stumbles upon Zaida, the woman he once loved but banished for rumored infidelity she never committed.
In NEO’s outdoor staging at Balboa Park’s Spanish Village on July 24 and 25, those particular twists and turns were defanged. The gypsies became free-spirited hippies, Selim became a non-exotic white male dressed more or less like his Italian hosts, and the opera’s female protagonists, Zaida and Fiorilla, became powerful, modern personalities, neither fickle nor shrinking-violet stereotypes.
But Il turco’s biggest claim on Kozma’s TLC may actually be the tension between Romani’s ironic, self-aware libretto and Rossini’s glorious music. Romani’s libretto is a thoroughgoing satire of Italian society and a core cast of conspicuously flawed people. Prosdocimo (the poet) is the cynical, controlling scriptwriter (in NEO’s setting) who cares only about crafting the story that best captures human folly — the very plot the opera itself stages. Fiorilla, the Italian woman Selim falls for, is manipulative and scornful of devoted relationships, including that with her jealous and weak husband, Geronio. Selim, the Turkish prince, is cocky, impulsive, and inconstant. The opera’s only potential hero/heroine, Zaida, appears fitfully in the libretto and is vastly overshadowed by the scheming Fiorilla.
Yet on this ship-of-fools cast of characters Rossini lavished ravishing bel canto music that, emanating from each flawed soul, renders them emotionally sympathetic. Borderline stock characters gain emotional credibility, even affirmation.
But rather than minimize this textual-musical tension, Kozma and Opera NEO doubled down. Seemingly inspired by Davide Livermore’s 2016 production for the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro, Italy, or even earlier film-set stagings, Kozma sets the action in a Hollywood film studio where money, commercialism, and fame amplify each character’s weaknesses. The opera begins with a director or producer indifferently handing Prosdocimo a script or treatment in exchange for the latter’s bribe. Each of the characters is initially just a would-be actor whom Prosdocimo recruits into his project. The exchange or filching of cash figures prominently in several scenes, product placement is a recurring motif, and a few ensemble scenes are presented as rave-up commercials for a coffee brand (Damelec, from Selim’s last name) inspired by Europe’s exotic “orientalized” image of Turkey.
As in NEO’s hyper-Americanized setting of Donizetti’s Elixir of Love in 2025, Kozma displays a razor-sharp eye for what novelist Tom Wolfe once called the “lurid spectacle” of American life. Scenes are inventively located in or feature an American diner, a boxing ring, a Harley, an ersatz spaceship (used to carry Geronio to the lunar surface), and a quotidian American couch replete with curlers, hair spray, nail polish, and hair dryer. In one scene, Fiorilla’s “official escort,” a despondent Narciso, suddenly begins waving around a gun (de rigueur in most Hollywood movies).
Other extra-libretto additions include characters’ whispered asides (always rendered in Italian or Italian-accented English), which allow Kozma to bend the libretto to his Americanized conception. When screenwriter Prosdocimo tries to invasively control Geronio’s action, the latter replies with a sarcastic “OK, OK, Christopher Nolan.” Likewise, NEO’s liberty-taking English surtitles give Kozma additional leeway to push his movie-studio premise without disrespecting Romani’s original libretto, sung apparently verbatim. A less appealing example of NEO’s trademark inventiveness was between-scene musical quotes of everyone from Tchaikovsky and Beethoven to Bart Howard (“Fly Me to the Moon”), performed on Fumiyasu Kawase’s fortepiano.
Romani’s irony ends (or suspends) when, just before curtain-drop, Prosdocimo announces the happy ending, literally (“my play has a happy ending”), which the cast then affirms: “Love is reborn, more beautiful.” But Kozma’s social critique presses on. He adds an Academy Award event that features Prosdocimo clutching an Oscar and much autograph-signing. Kozma’s stinging satire of a corrupt Hollywood film world seemingly indicts the corrupt society it inhabits.
How to square all this camp with Rossini’s affirming bel canto? For that, NEO’s brilliant cast stepped in, combining spot-on comic acting with vocalism of exceptional polish and style. In the central role of Fiorilla, soprano Tina O’Malley was a force of nature with a stage-stealing gravity others had to orbit. Yet she also delivered her arias — “Non si dà follia maggiore,” “Se il zefiro si posa,” and “Squallida veste e bruna”— with range, personality, and emotional power.
In the linchpin role of Prosdocimo, which barely let him leave the stage yet limited him largely to secco recitative, baritone Andrew Payne brought just the right measure of wheedling self-glorification. Even when thoroughly sidelined from the action, Payne managed to shape scenes (as while raptly scarfing a sandwich over his typewriter while watching his script unfold in Act 2). Bass-baritone Robert Ellsworth Feng injected sardonic humor and a dogged persistence into the unflattering role of Fiorilla’s cuckolded husband, earning him, against all odds, a kind of dignity.
Borneo-born baritone Scott Clark inhabited Turkish Prince Selim with a nice blend of regal presence, masculine entitlement, and slow-on-the-uptake susceptibility to Fiorilla and Zaida’s manipulation. Statuesque mezzo-soprano Ilanna Starr brought a powerful voice and magnetic presence to the dramatically key role of Zaida. Kozma himself led the Opera NEO Orchestra with color and precision; special kudos to the string section, trombonist Kayla Aponte, and Kawase’s nimble and playful continuo.
Kozma’s darkly knowing satire backlit his characters’ flawed natures by setting them in an absurd environment permeated by venality. Their redemption hangs on Rossini’s humanizing music and the bravura acting and vocal talent of NEO’s superb cast. Both were memorable.
