A favourable review can sometimes save a lot of money. This is a worthy opera and deserves a hearing. Well, your reviewer has heard it, and readers may well feel, having duly scanned his respectful account, they can conscientiously pass on to other matters. Giovanni Mayr (as he preferred to be called rather than Johannes) seems to have been a good composer and a good man. He loved Italy and spent his life there, mostly in Bergamo where this performance and recording took place. To Italian opera he brought two great gifts: a thorough knowledge of orchestration and a well-developed sense of form. If this opera (concerning rose-crossed lovers in fifteenth-century Yorkshire) and his other acknowledged masterpiece, Medea in Corinto (Opera Rara, 11/94), are typical in kind and exceptional principally in degree, then precious little left Mayr's workshop that was not thoroughly workmanlike. He did not belong to the musically chattering classes, and if rarely profound he is at least scarcely ever empty.
But hearing this, his fifty-sixth opera, does not promote an eagerness to enquire into the previous 55. Rather the contrary in fact. Their virtues are probably well represented here and nothing suggests that their vices would be of an interesting kind. Emotionally Mayr can bring his score to the point where something deeper can be felt stirring (as at the start of the duet for soprano and tenor in Act 2) but almost with the entry of the voices the equable conventions regain control. In situations of emotional turbulence the music seems not to rise. In some ways the very reliability of craftsmanship works against him—there is no suddenly 'irrational' musical event (as when the voice of Zerlina breaks through the dance music in Don Giovanni), and so the spontaneity of even the most unlikely events (and the scenario is full of them) is dulled.
In performance, the singers rise just about as much and as little as does the music. Each of the three principals sounds vocally rather dispirited and lifeless on arrival. Susanna Anselmi in the central 'trousers' role shows no relish for her words. Anna Antonacci produces some beautiful tones but seems content with that, making a very passive character of the heroine. As the tormented lover and friend-turned-traitor in whom goodness eventually prevails, Luca Canonici has probably the most rewarding of the roles, yet, decently as he sings, he establishes little by way of character. Chorus and orchestra perform well, and the sound is quite acceptable. I mustn't discourage readers who feel there may be something here worth investigating; but suggest all the same (ars longa, vita brevis) that there are certain works which it may be sufficient simply to have heard about.'