Music: Pioneering the Old

When the Bolshoi Opera crossed the Atlantic last year to Montreal's Expo 67, it lugged along 95 choristers, 48 soloists, 99 instrumentalists, 50 dancers, 127 staff assistants, 193 tons of scenery and five tons of Russian edibles. When Rome's Piccolo Teatro Musicale arrived in Manhattan last week, there was a little less to be seen—a handful of singers and players, one slightly overweight conductor, and a compact bundle of slats, screws and canvas that weighed scarcely more than a ton. But when the slats and canvas were screwed together into a miniature Neapolitan theater on the stage of Carnegie Hall, the audience found plenty to admire.

For though piccolo means small, the Piccolo Teatro Musicale stands for something very big in music today—a burgeoning interest in the baroque and post-baroque. Its leader, Renato Fasano, has played a pioneering role in bringing back Vivaldi and Corelli with his celebrated chamber ensemble Virtuosi di Roma. Now he is doing the same thing for the chamber operas of such composers as Paisiello, Cimarosa and Rossini.

The New York audience, nurtured in the Metropolitan Opera's grand-opera tradition, found a welcome change in Fasano's creation of an intimate, two-century-old court tradition. They chuckled when Italian Clown Sesto Bruscantini scored a solid single in Cimarosa's 18-minute solo opera Il Maestro di Cappella, and then roared out loud as Bruscantini and Carlo Badioli, an even funnier man, rapped out a two-bass hit with the huffa-buffa La Cambiale di Matrimonio, Rossini's first stage work. This week the troupe will pack the show on their backs for a brief tour of the U.S. and Canada, where audiences will no doubt agree that while in North America, it is perfectly acceptable for the Piccolo Teatro Musicale to continue to do as the Romans do.