Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra was premiered on 4 October 1815 at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, the major opera venue of the time. This event was the 23 year-old Rossini’s triumphant debut there and established his all-conquering dominion over the Italian music scene. Rossini approached his task with a desire for total success in opera seria, the genre which earned a composer immortality, and completed the opera in three months – a luxury by his usual standards. Elisabetta presents two new elements, both in Rossini’s output and in 19th century opera as a whole. The first is that he wrote out in full the coloratura passages and the second is that he abolished “dry” recitatives in favour of orchestral versions. However, the first was not entirely new because even in his early Demetrio e Polibio, Rossini had treated vocal flourishes as an underlying structure for the music and not as mere decoration for a melody line as baroque composers did. The second was already standard practice in Neapolitan opere serie, which allowed no “dry” recitative. Thus apart from the new accompanied type, recitatives were simply an orchestral transcription of the chords played by the harpsichord and this was perhaps the oldest and most static part of the way the opera was put together. The truly new element in Elisabetta is its being an opera tailored for a primadonna, i.e. resting firmly upon the crucial presence of the leading lady, with a series of topoi that would be copied at least until the arrival of Nabucco.

Following the runaway success of Cavalleria rusticana in 1890 at the age of 27, Mascagni did not rest on his laurels. In just a few years, he completed no less than five operas, including Iris, premiered at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome in 1898. Mascagni might well have taken for his own Puccini's famous quip, “Against everything and everyone, make a work from melody”. And in Iris it is melodic invention which shows the composer's genius at its greatest. A melody by Mascagni is usually long, smooth and Italian-sounding; and Iris is full-on melody all the way, particularly in such crowd-pleasers as Jor's Serenade, the “Hymn of the Sun” or the duet in Act II “Oh come al tuo sottile corpo s'aggira”, which includes the famous “Piovra”. Furtheremore, with a little effort listeners can identify what would be the various musical “numbers”. In Iris, Mascagni is almost obsessively attentive to recitative and his exemplary flexibility at times recalls the sublime "conversation style" "invented" by Puccini. The present production was recorded live at the Teatro Goldoni, Livorno, in December of 2017.

Bellini 's first opera is also the most complicated when it comes to reconstructing the composer's various versions and revisions of it. A major step forward came in 2001 when a series of hitherto unknown sources housed in the Fondo Mascarello in the library of the Milan College of Music allowed many previous gaps to be filled and a number of questions to be answered. Above all it enabled knowledge of Adelson e Salvini to be revised radically. In its sole authentic complete version, Adelson e Salvini is a French-style opera semiseria in which musical numbers are separate from spoken dialogue. Adelson e Salvini is surprisingly fresh in approach and heralds the great things that would later come from its composer.

The Florentine Ezio Camussi (1877-1956) was judged by Leoncavallo "a sure promise of our art" and supported at the publisher Sonzogno by Boito and Massenet. The libretto of Il Volto della Vergine by Paolo Buzzi is based on an ancient Christian legend, a miracle that occurred around 1425 in Florence. Fra Angelico is frescoing the Convent of San Marco and finds himself in difficulty in sketching the face of the Madonna. The teenage daughter of the gardener Fiorenzo, Grazia, beautiful and ill, asks to meet the painter, is enchanted by his work, and as she confesses to him her dreamed love for the young and handsome Lionello, the features of her face are miraculouslytransmitted to the image of the Virgin painted by Fra Angelico. The maiden dies. Camussi chooses a distinctly melodic language, both in the vocal writing and in the transparent orchestral support; he does not allow himself to be influenced by the solemn and declamatory examples of Pizzetti and Malipiero, and manages to create scenes of captivating, even if not very personal, singing, employing a technique of recurring thematic fragments, starting from those of the delicate Prelude. In this score, let's think of the mystical "tale" of Fra Angelico, of his prayer to the Virgin "Canta, Mistica Rosa" which Buzzi himself modeled as a sweet song, of Grazia's narration of her meeting with Lionello, of the intervention of the Novices "Divin splendor" which brightly closes the act.

On 9 October 1943, NBC Radio in New York broadcast the world premiere of a one-act opera by Italo Montemezzi (1875-1952), L’incantesimo, (The Spell), with Italian libretto by playwright Sem Benelli (1877-1949). The broadcast was a belated form of recognition, because by that time Montemezzi was widely famous in the United States. Conducted by Arturo Toscanini, this opera ran in New York for 25 seasons - an extraordinarily long-lived success, with such major names as Serafin, Stokowsky, De Sabata and Bruno Walter conducting quality editions of the work to widespread critical approval. In the New York Times, the respected critic Olin Downs echoed the general enthusiasm, praising the music, action and style as eminently suited to performance on the radio, adding that the work's lyricism was as strong as in L’Amore dei tre re, although perhaps less immediate than Puccini's. Montemezzi's moderately modern music follows a middle path between a freely declamatory approach for the main characters and more markedly melodic passages for tenor and soprano which might easily pass for short concert pieces or in the great narrative scene of the description of the hunt. Nonetheless, Montemezzi's real capacity for invention lies in his orchestral writing which evokes Wagnerian “infinite melody” and, in certain sections, the imaginative symphonic approach of Richard Strauss with its variety, wealth of color, modulation, rhythmic phrasing, and solo instrumental gesture.

Der vierjährige Posten (based on a libretto written by Theodor Körner) was composed in about ten days, from the 8th to the 19th of May 1815. As it happened with his three previous operatic attempts, Schubert never managed to see this Singspiel staged, and even after publication the score was long confined within library shelves. Only when the centenary of Schubert’s death was approaching, the publics of Dresden and Vienna were allowed to see it on stage, in September 1896 and at the beginning of 1897, respectively. Although it raised widespread curiosity and favorable reviews, the work soon disappeared again from the current opera-house repertoire. Today, even in German-speaking countries, it is seldom revived in concert performances, mainly on account of its lively Overture in two movements (Larghetto-Allegro), of the charming opening chorus, and of the quaint scene VI, consisting of a merry military march plus a chorus filled with a coarse sense of humor, which anticipates the features of the forthcoming Viennese light opera.

Classical Music

Il Pigmalione, the first theatrical attempt of a teenaged Donizetti, is something in between a school test and a visiting card to the operatic world. Donizetti was clearly a quick composer from the very beginning of his career. Il Pigmalione is an ambitious opera even though it is rather short and with limited staging demands involving just two voices and a medium-sized orchestra. Never performed during Donizetti’s life, Il Pigmalione was staged for the first time in 1960. Relatively luckier, Rita had been performed at the Opéra-Comique of Paris one hundred years earlier, after almost 20 years from its completion and 12 years after the composer’s death. Donizetti completed it in 1841. The score is divided into 8 numbers, symmetrically distributed to three characters. The short orchestra prelude introduces the title role: the variety of movements in this first number reflects the strong and fickle personality of Rita, almost a draft for the future Norina in Don Pasquale.

The present recording brings to a fitting conclusion a long process of research, study and performance of a hitherto lost and forgotten 18th century musical work from Italy. The composer, Leonardo Leo, was born in 1694 in San Vito dei Normanni (Brindisi) and died some 50 years later in Naples. One of the greatest of the so-called Neapolitan School, he had a major impact on music teaching in Europe. Already a fully-fledged composer, in 1722 the young Leo set to music the sacred work Dalla morte alla vita di Santa Maria Maddalena eremita on commission from the town council of Atrani, a small attractive coastal location near Amalfi, to celebrate the patron saint Mary Magdalen. After this performance the work was never mentioned again and all catalogues of Leonardo Leo’s output stated that the manuscript score was lost. In fact, a copy of it had travelled to southern France and reappeared in 2009 in a Paris bookshop. The Leonardo Leo Centre of Studies and Documentation acquired the manuscript in 2012. The manuscript comprises some 200 pages, many of them clearly in Leonardo Leo’s own hand, and was scrupulously transcribed with a view to correct performance practice. This was seen on several occasions in 2019 when the work was staged, albeit with several numbers removed, of which the present album is a faithful live recording. The road that led to this result was beset with many difficulties but the great determination of all those concerned beat the odds and has added a work of great value to Leonardo Leo’s surviving output and an invaluable source to knowledge of sacred music performance in the first half of the 18th century.

Classical Music

Schubert’s ninth operatic attempt marks his real debut on stage: Die Zwillingsbrüder. Schubert began to write the score in January 1819 and completed it within three-four months; but the usual show-business conspiracies kept it a long time in wait for its first performance, which took place on the 14th of June, 1820. High quality levels are to be found in the grand aria for Lieschen “Der Vater mag wohl immer Kind mich nennen” (n. 3): it has both vocal virtuosity and a skilful accompaniment based on the idyllic sound of the woodwinds. Other parts are noteworthy: the comic arrogance in the short aria for Franz “Mag es stürmen, donnern, blitzen” (n. 4), which sounds delightfully old-fashioned in its abundance of naively descriptive hints; the short bustling, even a little bit devilish, concertato ensemble “Packt ihn, führt ihn vor Gericht” (n. 9), a mass scene where we find the rushing counterpoint of the quintet and the sharp homophony of the chorus allied with a rapidly shifting harmonic texture. Such effects show that the twenty-two-years-old beginner was already well aware of how to use his compositional mastership for dramatic purposes.

Classical Music

Ghena Dimitrova and Giuseppe Giacomini one splendid evening at the opera in Genoa nearly thirty years ago. Two powerful voices which could stir the emotions like few others: on this particular evening in Genoa Ghena and Giuseppe were in good shape and immediately made that audience connection which makes an evening special, as the often-crazed applause proves. In the treble, their notes rang out with clarity, power and a lightning-fast attack; their phrasing was as imposing as it was tireless; their emotional tension sent shivers down the audience's collective spine; and, most importantly of all, they phrased their notes and articulated their words with a severity and intensity which makes the difference between a fine evening of operatic thrills and an interpretation deserving to be recorded for the benefit of those who were not lucky enough to be there on the night.

Paisiello wrote the music for Le gare generose to be premiered at the Teatro dei Fiorentini in Naples in the spring of 1786. The near-total absence of gags and slapstick routines plus the constant tension experienced by Bastiano and Gelinda who are on the run from alleged debts under false identities, suggest this opera belongs to the semiserio genre. This opera features middle-class characters rather than the usual aristocrats. Paisiello’s score features the arsenal of comic devices he would later employ in La Scuffiara or La Molinara. Music closely reflects the action on stage: in the duet for Bastiano and Gelinda “Scopa, scopa, netta e spazza”, what the violins play resembles the broom sweeping while the couple quarrel; it also reflects the physical nature of the characters and the images in the sung text by employing humorous madrigal-like devices – thus phrasing that rises and falls depicts butterflies in the first aria for Berlicco or a bee in the aria for Gelinda. In the Andante con moto of Finale I when the couple pretend to work while eavesdropping on the conversation between Dull and Berlicco, the orchestral figures at the beginning are intended to resemble the actions “rassettar” and “scopettar”, after which the musical emphasis shifts from action to emotional state – in this case, growing anxiety. Although Gare generose is a strange combination of the comic and the serious, it was remarkably successful. The success of the opera lasted until 1800 on the European circuit and with 37 different stagings, Gare generose is Paisiello’s twelfth most-performed opera.

This is the third album dedicated by Carlo Benatti, organist, pianist and composer from Mantua, to musicians who composed works for organ from his town, or strictly connected to his region by cultural reasons. The works included in this release have been recorded in four different organs, all located in the North Italy. Of a certain interest the works by Ettore Campogalliani, the teacher of famous opera singers such as Pavarotti, Tebaldi, Scotto, Labò, and Raimondi. Born in Mantua in 1963, organist, pianist, and choir director Carlo Benatti has given concerts in Spain, France, Germany, Austria, Croatia, and the US. ionally sung during Easter celebrations. His original piece on the present album is an elaboration on the sequenza Victimae Paschali Laudes for voice and organ in alternatim which is traditionally sung during Easter celebrations. This is a tribute to how the Mass was performed before the Vatican Council, when a line of Gregorian chant was first sung by the choir then played by the organ which elaborated on the melody in terms of harmony, counterpoint and imitation.