The
Opera Rara label has done valuable work in reviving forgotten operas, and it has had particular success in championing the work of
Saverio Mercadante, an Italian composer falling in between the bel canto composers and
Verdi chronologically. Anticipation based on that fact may have helped place this recording on classical best-seller charts in the spring of 2023, but here, the company delivers even beyond expectations. This is a studio recording based on a 2022 London production that marked the first performances of the opera since its 1842 premiere in Naples. There are still many traces of
Donizetti and
Bellini here, but
Mercadante moved away from the usual sequence of arias, cabalettas, and choruses and worked a good deal of the action into the basic melodic material. It would be a surprise if
Verdi did not know this work; much of its structure shows up in the opera
Macbeth from five years later.
Mercadante was prolific and could turn out two or three operas in a year, but this was an ambitious work and a good candidate for the
Opera Rara treatment. The story comes from the Commonwealth period in England and is a fine example of the Italian fascination with the exotic details (to Italians) of English history. The Cromwellians and the Royalists stand in for the Montagues and Capulets as heroine Malvina, believing her Royalist husband dead in a shipwreck, prepares to marry the Cromwellian Arturo and, after several episodes of high melodrama, commits suicide at the end. The singers here, an international group led by
Irene Roberts as Malvina, are a strong attraction, but even stronger is the work of conductor
Carlo Rizzi, leading the
Britten Sinfonia; he keeps the action moving along at a crackling pace. Sample the rush of events in the middle of the second act for an idea of the flavor of the production. The knock against the opera in its own time was that it lacked big tunes, and this is still true, but it doesn't matter too terribly much, for this opera is more successful as a piece of drama than many other more famous ones. A top-notch job all around. ~ James Manheim
