Opera no 172
Portugal: Le Somme cambiate
Soloists
City of London Sinfonia
Alvaro Cassuto
I’m really getting into unknown territory now. Portugal was one of the first Portuguese composers to write an opera - though the text is is Italian. I expected this to be a fairly simple work, really little more than a collection of songs, but I was quite wrong. This is a fully worked out opera which shows a composer able to work at a highly sophisticated level. The idiom obviously owes a lot to Mozart and I don’t think that you would notice is one or two pieces from this opera were quietly inserted into one of Mozart’s lesser known operas. But what is interesting is how forward looking the work is. The ensembles in particular do have a distinctly Rossinian quality about them even through Rossini was only 5 when this opera was first performed. Rossini was undoubtedly the undisputed master of the buffo style (and much more beyond that) but he didn’t spring from nowhere and operas like this show that his music was the natural development of what was happening in opera round the turn of the 19th century. So a very enjoyable discovery. It makes the point, which I have made many times already, that the operatic repertory is narrow and there are many people on the fringes (in the case of Portugal hardly even on the fringes) whose work is very worth exploring. But then that has been the whole purpos of this project.
