It’s certainly not every day, week or year that musical archaeology turns up a complete unperformed work from a composer in his maturity. The Angel of Nisida never reached performance while its composer was still active around the late 1830s, a time when Donizetti had turned his focus from Italy towards Paris. Instead the score was picked of suitable plums to be reworked and reused for Don Pasquale and La favorite, thereby satisfying the director of the Opéra and his ambitious mezzo-soprano mistress.

Almost 200 years later musicologist Candida Mantica, a research fellow at the University of Southampton, began work collecting up the scattered pieces of the manuscript score of L’ange de Nisida. In 2018, under the umbrella of Opera Rara, the re-established work was premiered in concert at the Royal Opera House (and recorded) under Mark Elder (6/19).

The present performance represents the score’s stage premiere, a version differing in some details because it was decided for Bergamo to keep to ‘pure’ Donizetti and not to use any ‘filler’ music for still-missing sections of the score, including some recitatives newly composed by Martin Fitzpatrick for London. The short missing recitatives are presented here quite effectively as unsung mime sequences.

The two performances make for a useful contrast governed by nationality and their respective conductors. Elder’s has that almost Beethovenian dynamic and drive always associated with his early Romantic Italian opera work; it sounds very much of its period. Jean-Luc Tingaud, a conductor both experienced in the opera house and (on recordings) associated with lesser-known French symphonic repertoire, brings a more through-composed, later 19th-century feel to the score. Both conductors have chosen their casts well and rehearsed carefully. Tingaud’s Fernand d’Aragon and Gaspar are perhaps better suited to the semiseria nature of the score and, in an actual staging, more alert to its comic possibilities than Elder’s, but both teams make their points well.

Francesco Micheli’s staging – hardly any props, no scenery as such but carefully rationalised and colourful medieval costume – is ingeniously set, using Bergamo’s theatre even though it was in the process of actual reconstruction. Some of the visual imagery parallels the use of a restored theatre for a ‘restored’ opera, employing imitation pages of the score as decoration and the covered floor of the actual auditorium as the staging area.

Although mounted in November 2019 (just before the current disruptive Covid outbreaks), the production strangely anticipates many of the improvisatory methods that would come to be employed in opera houses for keeping performers and audience protectively distant. To begin with, the chorus in concert dress and holding scores are restricted to the upper boxes of the auditorium, appearing only later downstairs in splendidly full costume. The cameras of the filming and the detailed and careful preparation of conductor Tingaud and director Micheli provide viewers of the DVD, through excellent sound and vision, with a more complete visual and aural experience than might have been possible for the real-life audience.

L’ange de Nisida is a classic formula drama of its period which concentrates on the familiar uneasy quadrilateral of monarch/mistress/Church/Romantic hero. That fact, and the rough ride given to hero and heroine – both beautifully sung and acted – make the opera uncannily like a 20 years’ anticipation of La forza del destino. Cunningly and efficiently done, both staging and musical interpretation fit the score like a glove. Hugely recommended.