Hard on the heels of the Bergamo Festival’s memorable 2022 bicentenary realisation of Donizetti’s Chiara e Serafina (4/24), we have this newly edited, strongly cast, expertly conducted and cleverly staged bicentenary revival of his Alfredo il grande – the more important of the two in terms of the evolution of Donizetti’s musical stagecraft.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s account of Alfred the Great’s hiding in a winter wilderness, before his defeat of what remained of the Danish insurgency at the battle of Edington in May 878, was first taken up in Thomas Arne’s superb three-act masque Alfred (of ‘Rule, Britannia!’ fame), premiered at Cliveden House in Berkshire in 1740. A simple tale of patriotism born of a need to repel a foreign invader, its reputation soon spread. Gaetano Rossi’s libretto for Simon Mayr’s Eraldo ed Emma (Milan, 1805) is not far removed from the text David Mallet and James Thomson had provided for Arne.

Strangely, Mayr returned to the subject in 1819 with a new libretto, Alfredo il grande, by his 24-year-old pupil Bartolomeo Merelli. Franz Hauk recorded this in 2019 (Naxos) – a real labour of love, given Merelli’s overlong and amateurish libretto and a score that belongs more to Paisiello’s age than Rossini’s.

The times, however, were changing. With Rossini on the verge of leaving Naples, Donizetti – another 24-year-old Mayr pupil, Merelli’s younger contemporary – was summoned to replace him. With the summons came the red-carpet treatment. First, there were the services of master librettist Andrea Leone Tottola; then the pick of the Teatro di San Carlo’s legendary array of old- and new-generation singers. These included the great ‘baritenor’ Andrea Nozzari, as Alfredo, and the English-born Elisabetta Ferron as Alfredo’s queen, Amalia, in this politically pointed response to Milan’s staging of Mayr’s Alfredo il grande.

Skilful as ever, Tottola stripped the Arthur story back to its essentials while building one of those 12-part dramatic structures for which Rossini’s Naples operas had become famous. This includes two large-scale solos for Alfred, a pair of powerful duets and a magnificent late quintet in which the victorious Britons debate how to deal with their Danish victims ahead of Alfred’s return.

Donizetti’s score is a fully worked-through composition, painted in military colours, swift-moving where necessary (the overture lasts barely more than a minute), and well able to fill out Tottola’s set-piece structures. Conductor Corrado Rovaris directs it with point and precision, despite being sniffy about both it and Tottola’s libretto in his booklet interview.

The staging, by multitalented Robert Carsen protégé Stefano Simone Pintor, echoes this with what is, in effect, an intriguingly staged (and nicely filmed) concert in costume, played out against a kaleidoscope of back-projections showing old maps, ancient book decorations (Alfred the man of letters) and footage of Trump-supporting activist Jacob Chansley in the January 2021 attack on the Capitol. Since Chansley is wearing a ninth-century Viking horned helmet, it is a timely reminder of the persistence of the enemy within.

Matching those old Neapolitan casts is no easy matter, yet Bergamo does well. The Alfred, Antonino Siragusa, is no baritenor, more a gifted tenore di grazia. Yet he’s sung other roles written for Nozzari, including Rossini’s Otello. It’s a vocally accomplished performance, as is Gilda Fiume’s Amelia. Lodovico Filippo Ravizza has genuine presence as Arthur’s henchman, Eduardo; and I was much taken with Antonio Garès’s sympathetic portrayal of the shepherd-pastor Guglielmo.

The opera ends with a showpiece rondò for Amelia. Yet even here convention is turned to advantage, since it’s only right, in an opera which is strong on the importance of women, that it’s she who delivers Alfred’s concluding message. As another great British war-leader would later put it, ‘in defeat defiance, in victory magnanimity, in peace goodwill’.

Fiume delivers it superbly. And how clever of Pintor to have the cast lined up for the choral envoi, scores in hand, at the end of what he suggests is a tale well told – as Bergamo’s fine revival undoubtedly is.