Overture: The Italian Girl in Algiers

What, you might ask, is a nice Italian girl like that doing in a place like this? The answer is that Isabella has come to rescue her lover Lindoro from slavery in the palace of Mustafa, Bey of Algiers. No defenceless innocent, she proves to be more than a match for Mustafa, whom she so effectively outwits that by the end of the opera she and Lindoro are on a ship back home to Italy.

While it has little or no musical relationship with the opera, the overture does reflect the spirit of its Italian heroine and something of both the comedy and the drama of the situation she finds herself in. Like most Rossini overtures, it begins with a slow introduction, this one approached by the stealthy step of quietly plucked strings and featuring an expressive melody on the oboe. The main Allegro section is based on two themes – the first a laughing matter for woodwind, the second a more lyrical idea for solo oboe again. After a characteristically long-sustained crescendo, in which one or two motifs are ever more energetically tossed around the orchestra, the two main themes are recalled and another crescendo powers its way to the closing bars.

First performed in Venice in 1813, incidentally, The Italian Girl in Algiers was Rossini’s first major, international success.