It is not long since Alfano’s almost-forgotten Cyrano de Bergerac made its appearance on record (4/03), to the surprise and delight of more reviewers than just this one. Now we have the opera that first brought him fame, his work based on the novel by Tolstoy and first produced in 1904, 32 years before Cyrano. It also deserves a welcome, and, like Cyrano, has been fortunate in the quality of the recording which introduces it to a new generation of listeners. This comes live from Montpellier and has an international cast (Italian, French, Russian) that seems fitting for an opera written in Paris, Berlin, Moscow and Posilippo just outside Naples. The performance goes well, led by the lyric-dramatic soprano, Denia Mazzola-Gavazzeni, who ably sustains a role which has her on stage almost the whole time, once a favourite of Eugenia Burzio and Mary Garden.

Although an off-stage chorus sings ‘Christ is risen’ at the beginning and end, the ‘resurrection’ of the title is in only a very broad and implicit sense religious. The story tells of a girl seduced and deserted, imprisoned, wrongfully convicted and sent to Siberia. Her redemption, or ‘resurrection’ (for the ill-turns of fortune have affected her character), begins there. Her seducer and another prisoner share in the process, as in the novel (and to some extent the opera) does life itself. As music-drama – or you might say simply as art – the score fails by being attractive when it should not. The scene in Act 3 in the women’s prison is a luxurious confection of tasty tunes, honeyed harmonies and rich orchestration. From the House of the Dead it is not. But it is an opera in which human issues matter – unique, I should think, in including an aria in praise of social service (‘quest’opera sublime, quest’opera d’amor’).

On stage, a charismatic prima donna might dominate the whole thing. On record it seems much more a company-production. Here, the small parts are particularly well-taken, beginning with the Governess, Nanà Kavtarashvili, whose fresh voice rather shows up the more worn areas of the heroine’s. Both leading men impress, the tenor Nagore with firm, well modulated tones, the baritone Petrov making the most of a part which does not appear till Act 4 but which is strong enough to have led Riccardo Stracciari to accept it at La Scala. Of Mazzola-Gavazzeni it would probably be unfair to speak without having seen her. Her singing is strong in emotional conviction if somewhat uneven in vocal quality. She nevertheless stands at the centre of a worthy performance. The orchestral writing is imaginative; without detracting from the voices it has a life of its own, well nourished by the conductor Friedemann Layer and the musicians under him. At a time when Alfano’s special niche in musical history as the completer of Puccini’s Turandot looks like being usurped by Luciano Berio, it is good to see him gaining proper recognition as a composer in his own right.