UK Edition
Review
Opera Rara unearths a naive Bellini gem at the Barbican - review
This is what is known in the trade as a “Wexford” opera – something of obscure historical interest and modest aesthetic merit, suitable for exhumation at the unique opera festival in that town, but not a runner in the bigger wider world.
In this case, however, Opera Rara – an organisation nobly dedicated to the revival of 19th-century operatic oddities – has got there first.
So here is Vincenzo Bellini’s first work for the theatre, written in 1824-5 while he was still a student, never professionally staged in the UK and only seldom elsewhere.
The plot will not bear examination. In the unlikely setting of 17th-century Ireland, Nelly is betrothed to Lord Adelson, a friend to the hysterical Italian painter Salvini whose secret infatuation with Nelly is exploited by Struley, a villain seeking revenge on Adelson.
The intrigue ends happily, sort of, because this belongs to a type of early 19th-century opera known as “semi-seria”, in which comic, romantic and melodramatic elements are promiscuously mixed and a potential catastrophe finally averted.
Rossini’s La Gazza Ladra, a major hit in the early 1820s, may well have been the example of this mongrel genre that most affected Bellini. Rossini is certainly the dominant influence over a score which imitates several of his trademarks, including passages of virile coloratura for the tenor, nonsense arias for a farcical buffo bass and a faster-and-louder choral finale.
Bellini reproduces these dutifully, but it is only in Nelly’s melancholy first-act aria (later recycled into I Capuleti e I Montecchi), a duet for tenor and baritone presaging Norma and Salvini’s sinuously phrased final lamentation that one senses the gestation of the composer’s personal voice. Everything else is rookie stuff, thinly orchestrated and weakly characterised.
Opera Rara’s concert performance was excellent, however, and Bellini’s admirers will be grateful for a chance to hear this naive music. Enea Scala, a tenor familiar to Glyndebourne audiences, was stylistically elegant and technically secure as the volatile Salvini and Maurizio Muraro raised the odd chortle as the bumbling servant Bonifacio. The remainder of the cast, including Daniela Barcellona’s soft-grained Nelly, was adequate.
But the evening’s most impressive element was the finely judged conducting of Daniele Rustioni – like Muti or Mackerras, he knows how to give such music propulsion while allowing it dignity, and his commitment ensured that the BBC Symphony Orchestra – more accustomed to Boulez than Bellini – didn’t just sail through its note-spinning heedlessly.
No further performances, but this performance will be broadcast on an as yet unspecified date on BBC Radio 3; and a recording on the Opera Rara label will be issued in 2017