Recording of the Week, Donizetti's L'Ange de Nisida

The concept of a Donizetti world premiere recording in 2019 seems so unlikely that my colleagues asked me to check my facts thoroughly before running this piece, but today does indeed bring the first-ever outing of L’Ange de Nisida, composed in 1839 for a Paris theatre which went ‘into administration’ before the opening night and belatedly premiered at Covent Garden only last year. Much of its music was swiftly repurposed for the grand opera La favorite (which follows the same broad plotline), but roughly half the score had never been heard until the concert-performances from which this recording was taken – and all of it is emphatically worth hearing.

As conductor Sir Mark Elder explains in our recent interview, the fact that the opera sank without trace in Donizetti’s own lifetime was largely down to the rules and regulations on ‘house-style’ at each individual Parisian theatre, and the first fifteen minutes of the opera were enough to convince me that the composer's decision to upcycle some of the music for a radically different work rather than attempting to interest another venue in the existing score was a shrewd one. Unlike its beneficiary La favorite, L’Ange belongs to the opera semiseria tradition, and its curious hybridity is as disconcerting to modern ears as (one imagines) it would have been to the doyens of the Académie Française, where La favorite was eventually staged: lyric utterances in the grand style nestle alongside exuberant buffo writing, and some of the most impressive and innovative passages in the score are those where Donizetti combines the two genres simultaneously (try the great closing ensemble of Act Two, where the eloquent suffering of three characters is undercut by the patter of a fourth).

The orchestral opening is one of the few sections of the score which was never traced (it’s possible that Donizetti never got as far as writing one), and Martin Fitzpatrick’s skilfully crafted Prelude sets up the expectation that we’re in opera seria territory, which seems to be borne out by the first appearance of the tenor Leone (the bright-voiced Korean David Junghoon Kim) when he arrives on the scene to implore the flowers to carry his sighing to his beloved. The next character we meet, however, is the inept but supremely self-confident courtier Don Gaspar (brought vividly to life by Laurent Naouri), who introduces himself in a gloriously bumptious patter-aria which catalogues the various professional services he offers: Rossini’s Figaro with a French accent and a promotion. (In another nod to Barbiere, Gaspar spends most of the first act arranging choral flashmobs to serenade people, then hastily dismissing them when it turns out to be a bad time).

The ‘Ange’ of the title is Countess Sylvia, saintlier than her mezzo counterpart in La favorite and limpidly sung by Joyce El-Khoury, who sounds more comfortable than she did when bringing another homesick courtesan to life in the recent world premiere recording of Liszt’s Sardanapalo (no small wonder, given Donizetti’s more idiomatic vocal writing). There’s no foreshadowing of Léonor’s great aria of remorse from La favorite in her solo scene, and occasionally the role feels underwritten, but the Opera Rara team give her her moment in the spotlight with an interpolated cabaletta from Maria Padilla (somewhat inauthentic given the Parisian disdain for vocal fireworks, but impressive all the same).

For the most part the stylistic hybridity of the score works in favour of the drama, but just occasionally there’s a slight mismatch between sentiment and utterance – for instance in the showstopping but incongruous duet for king and courtier at the beginning of Act Three, where the two ‘defy heaven and earth’ in the manner of two buffo basses about to embark on a jolly jape in a Rossini comedy, or the Act Two stand-off between the King and his reluctant mistress, which would scarcely sound out of place in the mouths of Adina and Dulcamara from L'elisir d'amore.

Whether Donizetti’s Angel will ever spread her wings in a fully-staged production remains to be seen, but in the meantime this thoroughly committed performance is a wonderful opportunity to hear some familiar material in its original context and to discover some astonishingly innovative music which has never before seen the light of day.