Bel canto fans talk in reverent terms about Donizetti’s ‘Tudor trilogy’, Anna Bolena, Maria Stuarda and Roberto Devereux. Beverly Sills sang their Tudor queens with New York City Opera in the 1970s and Welsh National Opera staged all three operas in a single touring season. But that’s to overlook Donizetti’s first Tudor effort, Il Castello di Kenilworth, premiered in 1829 in Naples, ‘neither too well performed nor too well received’, according to the composer, who revised it the following year.

The opera takes its inspiration from Sir Walter Scott’s 1821 novel Kenilworth and focuses on Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester’s (‘Lay-chest-er’ as set in Italian) attempts to court favour with Queen Elizabeth I, which he can only do by keeping his recent marriage to Amelia a secret. To keep his wife out of the way when the queen visits his residence, Kenilworth Castle, Leicester arranges to have Amelia locked up by his equerry, Warney, who lusts after her and stirs up trouble. Unlike the novel, where Warney kills Amelia, the opera ends with Elisabetta forgiving Leicester.

The opera has been recorded twice before, a 1977 performance by Opera Rara at the Camden Festival, then in 1989 at the Donizetti Festival in the composer’s home town of Bergamo. Last year’s Donizetti Festival saw a new staging by Maria Pilar Pérez Aspa which features on this DVD/Blu-ray (the audio is also released on CD), the first recording of the original 1829 version.

It’s fair to surmise that the director blew the budget on the lavish costumes, because there’s precious little staging of which to report, a raked set with a few carpets unfurled to suggest location. Amelia is locked up in a wheeled-on cage, while the idea of Elisabetta’s personal imprisonment is suggested by being trapped in her robes and regalia.

None of Donizetti’s music is especially memorable, apart from the use of a glass harmonica in Amelia’s aria ‘Par che mi dica ancora’, seemingly a dry run for the instrument’s appearance in the mad scene of Lucia di Lammermoor a few years later. The Donizetti Festival gathered a respectable cast under the lively Italian conductor Riccardo Frizza and the results are enjoyable. Jessica Pratt is a spirited soprano in bel canto repertoire and gives Elisabetta plenty of coloratura fire. Carmela Remigio has a warmer soprano and presents a sympathetic Amelia. The confrontation between the two women presages the Elisabetta-Maria Stuarda face-off but without the same venom.

The tenors come off less well. Xabier Anduaga is a decent bel canto stylist as Leicester, although his voice becomes pinched in the nosebleed territory, and Stefan Pop is no more than serviceable as the villainous Warney.