Paer: Leonora

Opera no 69

Paer: Leonore

Soloists

Bayerisches Symphonieorchestra

Peter Maag

This is a much longer version of the story that the Mayr which I listened to previous - there is about 2 1/2hrs of music here altogether. Again there is striking music in the arias for the main characters but a lot of the rest of it is rather thin. All very competent of course as one would expect from a composer whose work was widely performed in his lifetime but much of the invention seems rather routine. Paer also didn’t quite know when to stop - the overture came to what seemed like a resounding end and then continued on for another couple of minutes and several of the arias were overextended to give the singers plenty of coloratura opportunities - this is an Italian opera after all!. The role of Marzellina is far too prominent and showy - she appears needlessly just after Florestan and Leonora have discovered each other and instead of leaving them to get re-acquainted  she sings an elaborate duet with Leonora. Any sense of dramatic tension is lost.

Within the confines and conventions of Italian opera there is a plenty here to enjoy but this is never going to be a credible alternative to Beethoven. That is too much to expect.

Mayr: L'amor conjugale

 

Opera no 68

Mayr: L'amor conjugale

Soloists

Opera Fuoco

David Stern

There is a fascinating group of Operas from round the turn of the 19^th century which all share the same basic story as Fidelio. I want to explore some of them in this part of the project. Winton Dean’s chapter on Beethoven and opera has been a very helpful guide here.

Mayr was an important composer who features in the history books largely because of his setting of Medea in Corinto and this version of the Fidelio story. The character names are changed but the basic  plot is broadly the same. Much of the music is Mozartian in style – though the more you hear of opera  of this period them more you realise just what a genius Mozart was – but there are some places which looking forward to early 19^th century opera. It is rather an unbalance work. It is quite short and some it is is quite light, but there are two huge arias, one for the Lenora and one for Florestan characters. These are both impressive and show real expressive breadth. Curiously some of the music in the latter part of the opera seems almost to be a straight lift from Cosi fan Tutte – surely it can’t be coincidence. Dean doesn’t comment on this and I’ve not found any reference to it elsewhere. Very odd.

Would this opera be worth listening to if it were not for Fidelio?  I’m not sure. Some of it is impressive but elsewhere it shows a mastery of the standard tropes of late 18^th century opera without anything particularly distinctive.  

Handel: Rodelinda

Opera no 51

Handel: Rodelinda

Soloists

Raglan Baroque Soloists

Nicholas Kraemer

Handel is another of those composers to whom I came late. I wrote about this in last year’s blog https://andrew365newpieces.blogspot.com/search/label/Handel and now Handel, with Rameau, is one of the composers I turn to more than almost any other. 

I know several of the operas well but Rodelinda is one which I have not seen and I although I was familiar with some of the arias and the overture I hadn’t heard the whole opera before. What a superb work it is. Winton Dean in his seminal book on Handel’s operas says that Rodelinda is the third major masterpiece produced by Handel in less than twelve months, an achievement without parallel in the history of opera.

His enthusiasm for the piece is completely justified-  this is a superb work which shows Handel at his very best. Aria after aria proceeds with an almost unbroken series of pieces of the highest quality. We get all of the moods from tragedy through to exuberance and excitement. It all seems effortless - the Vivaldi in the previous opera seemed rather laboured by comparison - but of course it is Handel’s genius that makes it all possible. Some of the music is absolutely ravishing and expressive. Handel’s harmony seems straightforward on the surface but in fact it is highly sophisticated with some extraordinary chromatic inflections.

This is the end of this short exploration of Baroque opera.  I don’t find myself naturally sympathetic to the earlier composers but towards the end of the Baroque era Handel and Rameau in their very different ways are among the greatest of all opera composers and I return to them again and again. But the next stage of the project moves into very different territory. German romantic opera.

Vivaldi Ercole sul Termodante

Opera no 50

Vivaldi Ercole sul Termodante

Soloists

Europa Galante

Fabio Biondi

As far as I know I have never heard a single note from any of Vivaldi’s operas. Until recently they were more or less unknown territory but many of them have now been recorded. 

I didn’t have high expectation of this piece. I had in my head the cliche that Vivaldi wrote the same concerto 600 times and thought that it might apply also to his operas. In other words we were going to get lots of painting by numbers as Vivaldi turned the handle on his compositional machine.

To start with my fears seemed justified because I found the first few numbers very routine and uninspired, but the piece grew on me. Vivaldi introduced some interesting harmonic diversions here and there and there was quite a few few places where there were some unexpected rhythms. I felt that the slower and more lyrical music worked better than the faster sections. He has a real flair for the pastoral idiom whereas I thought that some of the faster, more extrovert music was way over the top - the singers, particularly the tenor., really struggled with some of it.

Stylistically the nearest point of reference to this music is probably the operas of Handel, but I don’t think that this is the same league. Pleasant at parts of it certainly it didn’t really make the impact that Handel at his best really can achieve. Handel is next in this project so a side-by-side comparison will be interesting.

This is the 50th opera in this project. When I started I wasn’t sure how how I was going to pace things but I have managed to get half way after only 4 months. So at this rate I might well get to something closer to 150 operas. Still I won’t set a target and I’ll see what happens - I’m not going to run short of composers or operas.

Cavalli: La Calisto

 Opera no 46

Cavalli: La Calisto

Soloists

Glimmerglass Opera

Jane Glover

I can't say that I got much pleasure out of this opera. Like the Monteverdi (opera 45) I have vague memories of seeing the Glyndeborne production on television but I don’t remember any of the music itself,

The music was not unpleasant in any way but I didn’t find much to latch onto. One of the problems was that I didn’t have a libretto so  couldn’t really follow what was going on other than at a very basic level, The other was that this was a recording of a live performance so at times gales of laughter almost drowned the music - there nothing unfunnier than a joke that you can’t understand.

This was an abridged edition of the opera edited by Jane Glover, who was one of the first female conductors to achieve any sort of fame in this country. She also wrote the leading book on Cavalli in English. To me the edition sounded idiomatic - not too plain but not over elaborate either. It is just unfortunate that I didn’t find the music very interesting.

Monteverdi: Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria

 Opera no 45

Monteverdi: Il Ritorno  d'Ulisse in Patria

Soloists

Concerto Vocale

René Jacobs

Of the three surviving Monteverdi operas this is the least known. I do have a vague memory of seeing at least some of it on television in the days when opera on mainstream TV channels was not a rarity, but I certainly did not remember any of the music.

This is a generation on from the Peri (opera no 44) and the format is gradually becoming something more like we expect from opera. There is more distinction between the arias the the recitative and an altogether greater sense of dramatic pacing.

Of course there are many editorial decisions to be taken in performing an opera like this. I followed it with the manuscript score on line. Much of this is only written in two parts - a vocal line and a bass line. There is no indication of instrumentation let alone dynamics or speeds. The performance I heard years ago would have been in the Raymond Leppard version which now does seem over romanticised. But a performance with just a basic continuo line would be very hard work.  The conductor here, in his extensive booklets, talks through some of the problems and explains that he had attempted to steer a middle course between the extremes, though he accepts that some people will be scandalised by what he has done!  I'm no expert in the music of this period but it seemed to me most of the time that he had got it about right. But it did seem to become a little more interventionist as it went on - at times I did think that the instrumental additions were overdone - particularly some duetting passages for cornetti - effective as they undoubtedly were. 

It would be fascinating if a set of performing materials for this opera ever turned up. It might give a completely different perspective to our experience of Monteverdi the dramatist.

Peri: Euridice

Opera no 44

Peri: Euridice

Soloists

Ensemble Arpeggio

Roberto de Caro

This is where is all started. Euridice is the earliest serving opera. (Peri’s earlier opera Dafne has not survived). It is of course very different to any of the operas I have listened to so far in this project. It is largely made up of recitative with some madrigal-like passages for combined voices and a few purely instrument moments. To be honest I was expecting to be rather bored by in fact much of it was rather compelling. The vocal line is very flexible and there are some surprising harmonic twists and turns. The most obviously dramatic moment is the repeated interjections of the chorus after the news of the death of Euridice - this was genuinely moving.

Of course any performance of a piece like this has to be conjectural. We don’t really know how the music sounded originally, what instruments were used and how the text was articulated. But to me this performance did seem credible - it was quite stripped back and a long way removed from the sort of reconstructions that Raymond Leppard did 50 years ago when performing Monterverdi and Cavalli. Though who is to say that those composers might have loved the way he approached his realisations. There was only one moment where some additional recorded parts seem to come in from nowhere and twitter away for a a while before disappearing again. 

This sort of opera is probably very difficult to bring off in the theatre but as a purely aural experience it was attractive and well worth hearing. It is a good start to the next part of this project.

Bellini: I capuleti e Montecchi

Opera no 28

Bellini: I Capuleti e Montecchi

Soloists

Vienna Symphony Orchestra

Fabio Luisi

My knowledge of Bellini is fairly limited. I saw Norma years ago and included La Sonnambula in my project last year https://andrew365newpieces.blogspot.com/2025/10/bellini-la-sonnambula.html but that is about it. This, Bellini’s version of Romeo and Juliet struck me as almost two operas joined together as one.  When Romeo and Juliet are not singing much of the music seems to me to be routine rum-ti-tum without any special merit. But the music for the lovers - both women in this version - is on another plane altogether. There is some ravishing music here which shows Bellini’s supreme command of the long melodic line and ability to colour what is essentially straightforward harmony with telling chromatic inflections. The orchestration is also highly effective - particularly the use of the harp and long solos for the cello and the clarinet. Bellini is able to conjure a dream-like atmosphere in a way few other composers have matched. The entrance aria for Juliet is particularly haunting, as is the final duet. Again though, as I have noted before, the very end is rather disappointing - a few bars of noisy ‘painting by numbers’ trivial music for the chorus. A real pity, but it does goes with the territory with operas of this period.

At its best this was a superb opera - just a pity that it is not all at the same level of invention.

This concludes this brief look at Italian opera in the pre-Verdi era. I’ll return to Italy later in this project but next I will spend some time on Czech opera.

Donizetti: Maria Stuarda

 Opera  no 27

Donizetti: Maria Stuarda

Soloists

Chorus and Orchestra of the Teatro Comunale di Bologna

Richard Bonynge

Don Pasquale is one of my favourite operas but other than that my knowledge of Donizetti is pretty patchy. Perhaps there is just so much to go at that it is all a bit overwhelming. 

I remember seeing the famous confrontation scene between Mary and Elizabeth (which of course didn’t happen in real life) on a TV broadcast years ago and I knew the prayer that Mary sings before her execution - other than that his was new piece for me.

There was a fair amount of rum-it-rum routine in the more vigorous sections of the opera - something one has to get used in Italian operas of this period of course - but the lyrical material is highly attractive - there are some wonderful moments throughout the score. The confrontation scene is dramatic but the final pages are probably the best  in the opera. The prayer is intensely moving and there is some heartbreaking music here - perhaps the very last moments are rather weak and hackneyed - composers of this period often didn’t quite know to end pieces.

So I was glad to have heard the opera. Whether it will lead to my exploring the rest of Donizetti’s output remains to be seen. 

Ricci: Crispino e la Comare

Opera  no 26

Ricci: Crispino e la Comare

Soloists

Orchestra Internazionale d’Italia

Jader Bignamini

This is a rare example of an opera by two composers. The Ricci brothers both had independent careers as opera composers but came together to write some works jointly.

I was aware of this opera but I had never heard it before. It is something of a romp. Some of the music is routine but it has charm and some energy - though it rarely pales in comparison to the Rossini in the previous entry in this project) and it was well worth listening to. There are some extended ensembles including a trio for the male characters which is highly amusing. I remember talking to the great Bonaventura Bottone (who sang with the Nottingham Opéra Group) about this trio. Early in his career he took part in a performance of the opera at the Wexford festival. In rehearsal they found this trio very long and rather dull and wanted to make cuts, but in fact on stage it turned out to be the hit of evening!

Apparently Luigi wrote all of the music in 3/4 and Federico the music in 2/4! I suppose that is one way of dividing up the responsibilities. Alas the brothers fell out badly and Luigi did not attend the premier! It will be interesting to listen to some of the opera which which they wrote as individuals. Some recordings of extracts are available.

 

Rossini: Matilde de Shabran

Opera  no 25

Rossini: Matilde de Shabran
Soloists
Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia
Riccardo Frizza

Rossini is one of my great enthusiasms. I’m gradually working my way though the lesser known operas and I was delighted to discover this piece. What a cracker it is!  It absolutely fizzes with energy and excitement in a way that nobody in my experience has been able to match.  It is very much an ensemble opera with lots of hair-raising episodes which must be a nightmare to get together in the theatre. Recordings have a definite advantage there.

But these are also some highly attractive solo numbers, including one with an astonishing obligato for solo horn (a nod perhaps to Rossini’s horn-playing father), some extremely demanding coloratura for the tenor soloist and a final aria for the Soprano that simply blows you away. What an opera!

Pacini Saffo

Opera  no 24

Pacini: Saffo

Pacini is another of those Italian 19th century opera composers who had been squeezed out between Donizetti/Bellini and Verdi. I don’t think that I had heard anything of his before - perhaps the odd extract on one of the Opera Rara compilation CDs.

I have to say that my first impressions were not positive. I thought that most of Act 1 was full of clichés, indeed at times it seems almost like a parody of Italian opera. But things changed in Act 2 - there was a really impressive duet for two female voices and some dramatic ensembles at the end of the Act, which ended with real energy and drama. 

The third act also had some high quality music, The sombre music as the crowd gathers to watch the heroine leap to her death off a cliff was genuinely moving and brought to mind Spontini and serious Rossini in places.

So after a poor start I really got into this opera. Overall it didn’t impress me quite as much as the Mercadante which preceded it in this project but I was still very glad to have heard it.

Mercadante: Orazi e Curiazi

Opera  no 23

Mercadante: Orazi e Curiazi

Soloists

Philharmonia Orchestra

David Parry

Mercadante didn’t feature in last year’s 365 new pieces project. That’s quite a surprise looking back because he is a good composer and thanks to various compilations on the Opera Rara label I have head quite a few extracts from his opera. I did also listen to his version of La Vestale a few years ago.

I thought that this was a splendid opera. Verdi is the obvious point of comparison and I think that Mercadante comes out of the comparison pretty well. He doesn’t have the melodic gift of Verdi and neither does he have the same mastery of concision. But on its own terms it works very well.  Some of it is pure ‘blood and thunder’ but that is all part of the appeal and Mercadante certainly whips up some impressive energy. He is also a very innovative orchestrator - the score has all sorts of interesting touches. I genuinely think that if this was a Verdi opera it would be performed with some regularity. As it is one has to be grateful to Opera Rara for all its efforts in promoting Mercadante as an important figure in 19th century Italian opera. 

Balfe: Falstaff

Opera no 14

Balfe: Falstaff

Soloists

RTE concert orchestra

Mario Zambelli

Balfe came off badly in my 365 project year. I condemned the Bohemian Girl to the list of pieces I never wanted to hear againhttps://andrew365newpieces.blogspot.com/2025/06/balfe-bohemian-girl.html.  So I didn't have high expectation for this. It turned out however to be an impressive piece. It is an Italian opera very much in the tradition of Donizetti and could easily pass for an early Verdi opera (it is a near contemporary of Oberto). It has all of the vigour one expects from an Italian opera of this period together with some attractive ensembles. The individual arias themselves are perhaps less appealing - they are obvious display pieces with some, what now seems, distracting coloratura and ornamental writing. The big tenor aria, written for Rubini, was completely over the top, obviously to show off the star tenor's agility in the highest register. At the time he would have sung the high notes in a semi-falsetto. The 'ut de poitrine' ie. the top C with the full chest voice was for the next generation of singers.  The singer here, Barry Banks, made a decent shot of it but it really is quite a challenge to listen to.

The scene of Falstaff being teased and pinched came off well here (as it has in all of the operas in this little series) and similar the Windsor forest atmosphere was atmospherically created.  How strange it is that The Bohemian Girl, which I thought was a pretty tawdry piece, held the stage for at least 100 years whereas this opera was performed precisely six times and then completely forgotten until it was revived for this performance.  There's no accounting for taste. 

Salieri: Falstaff

Opera no 12

Salieri: Falstaff

Soloists

The madrigalists of Milan

Alberto Veronesi

For the next few operas I am going to look at works inspired by Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor.  I won’t be including Verdi’s Falstaff because that is an opera that I know so well (and besides I have already included Verdi in this project) but there are quite a few others to go at.

I wasn’t aware, until I acquired this CD in a second-hand sale, that Salieri had written an opera based on the play so I was intrigued to hear what it might be like.  It is of course almost impossible not to think of Salieri without remembering the play/film Amadeus and I am afraid that that is exactly what occurred to me at the start of this piece. The overture started off with some very trivial, cliched, material which irresistibly reminded me of the scene in the film where Mozart played a march by Salieri in a mocking style and transmuted it into something from Figaro. I found most of the first Act very weak and it was hard to get engaged with it. Things did improve after that - there were some spirited ensembles and some more attractive numbers but overall I do think that this opera is a lost cause. Cecilia Bartoli recorded a CD of extracts from Salieri operas some years ago and there are some interesting things there, but I suspect she had to wade though a lot of ordinarily material before finding enough worth recording.

Amadeus is fiction and the portrayal of Mozart there is highly contrived and unlikely. But it does have a deep dramatic truth. The gulf between talent and genius is at once wafer thin and absolutely enormous.

Haydn: L'incontro improvisso

Opera no 10

Haydn: L'incontro improvisso

Soloists

Lausanne chamber orchestra

Antal Dorati

This is Haydn's version of the same text as set but Gluck in my previous post. Haydn's libretto expands the text as set by Gluck and in particular includes a number of ensemble.  It is a much longer work than Gluck's taking up 2 1/2  CDs.

Although I am great Haydn enthusiast his operas are virtually unknown territory as far as I am concerned. I did see La Fedeltà premiata years ago but I don't really remember much about it. Other than that I will probably have heard the odd aria or two but that is about it.

The biggest issue with Haydn's operas is that they are not Mozart! By that I meant that although the musical substance is very similar Mozart's mastery of the stage and of dramatic development is not something that Haydn can match. But of course that is an unfair comparison because Haydn wasn't really trying to do that. His conception of opera was much more of individual numbers in their own right rather than as part of a dramatic sequence. But taken in its own right there is some wonderful music here and I thoroughly enjoyed listening to it.  Yes there are some passages of rather stilted coloratura for the soprano and the tenor but these are more than outweighed by music of great humour and lyricism. The highlight was probably the extraordinary trio in Act 1 for three female voices. In purely dramatic terms it is probably overlong but in musical terms it is full of wonderful touches, with some remarkable moments of chromatic inflection.

Robbins Landon singles this trio out for special praise in what are otherwise a fairly perfunctory few pages about the opera in his masterful five volume biography of the composer. I get the sense that he didn't really engage with the operas and was far happier discussing the string quartets, symphonies and particular the late choral music. Perhaps he was right. I can't see Haydn's operas ever becoming part of the repertory  - they just aren't Mozartian enough - but now that I have heard this I am keen to explore more of Haydn't operatic output.

Mozart: Lucio Silla

Opera no 7

Mozart: Lucio Silla

Soloists

Nicholas Harnoncourt

The mature operas of Mozart have been part of my musical life for as long as I remember. Playing in the orchestra for a production of Cosí fan Tutte when I was still at school was a formative experience. But I have never explored the earlier operas, so this was a good opportunity to start to put that right.

Lucio Silla is as astonishing work for a 15 year old. He had already mastered all the techniques of Italian opera seria and was writing music of real power. Indeed there are many places in the score where you get a real foretaste of what was to come.

But of course this is an opera seria. So instead of the dramatic narrative that we get in the mature works we are still in the world of long arias interspersed by recitatives. There are a few ensemble numbers but those are perhaps the less striking parts of the score. There is also significant amounts of coloratura passages. Those are of course still present in the mature operas but here they really do seem there simply to show off the singers’ abilities. There is more for the chorus to do than one expects in an opera of this type but the chorus is still rather peripheral. It is the soloists who, as individuals, are at the heart of this opera  It is a score dominated by women’s voices - there is inevitably a trouser role and the tenor only has two full arias - there was a problem with the original production which meant that he could manage the four operas he was originally going to be allocated. 

Perhaps the highlight of the score is the long arias near the end of Act 3 for Cecilia. This has astonishing maturity and the slow section, in particularly, wouldn’t be out of place in any of the more famous operas.

This recording has had mixed reviews. It does have some small cuts and Harnoncourt’s conducting has been criticised as over interventionist and over emphasising the rhetorical gestures. I didn’t hear it that way - in fact I thought that it was extremely expressive and made the most of what was a fascinating score.