★★★★☆
Everyone knows the overture to The Thieving Magpie, but you need to be a pretty assiduous operatic magpie yourself to catch a staging of the full Rossini opera. Hasten to Milan, then. To honour the 200th anniversary of the premiere of La gazza ladra, in this very theatre, Riccardo Chailly is conducting every blessed note of Rossini’s score — all 3 hours and 40 minutes of it.
It’s a fine musical achievement, and an act of faith in a work that hovers disconcertingly between the usual Italian comic conventions (young woman trying to escape from a powerful old lecher) and near-tragedy — with the magpie’s thefts almost causing the same woman to be wrongfully executed for stealing her employer’s spoons. That might