The Valle d’Itria Festival at Martina Franca in Southern Italy has long specialised in 18th- and 19th-century operatic rarities, more especially, variant versions of those rarities. (This year’s festival features the first staging in modern times of Antonio Pacini’s Rossini pastiche – Paris, 1826 – Ivanhoe.) What we have on the present set is a live recording of the revival at last year’s festival of Rossini’s Otello. The revival sported a couple of variants: first was a female Otello after the manner of Giuditta Pasta (King’s Theatre, London, 1828) and Maria Malibran (Theatre Italien, Paris, 1831); second was the deployment – within the same performance – of the opera’s original tragic ending and the so-called ‘happy ending’ prepared by Rossini for the Teatro Argentina in Rome in 1820.
Neither variant (gimmick, some would say) is entirely new to the gramophone. The appendices to the 1999 Opera Rara recording of Otello include the whole of the Rome ending plus a taste of the Pasta/Malibran Otello in the Act 2 duet, ‘Non m’inganno’, sung by Enkelejda Shkosa (Otello) and Juan Jose Lopera (Iago). Prior to that, part of the Act 2 Trio ‘Ah vieni, nel tuo sangue’ had been recorded, to stunning effect, on a Rossini recital disc (RCA, 4/99) by Vesselina Kasarova (Otello) and Juan Diego Florez (Rodrigo). The mezzo-soprano warrior is not unknown in the annals of opera and Kasarova’s recording shows that a female singer can, indeed, make a plausible Otello providing she has the kind of burnished tone and forceful manner Rossini’s writing calls for. (The role was written for the grandest and most baritonal of the Naples tenors, Andrea Nozzari.)
In the theatre, of course, the singer’s voice is aided by her appearance and gesture. There were those who saw Pasta in London in 1828 who thought her performance the equal of, even superior to, that of the actor who had made Othello his own, Edmund Kean. I didn’t see the Valle d’Itria production last year but I would imagine that their Otello, Irine Ratiani, seemed vivid enough when made-up and in full flow. Alas, for all the intelligence of her declamation, this does not come across on record where the voice itself can seem unduly feminine and soprano-like, a particular problem when Otello is on stage with as strong and affecting a Desdemona as Patrizia Ciofi. She is at her best in the Willow song and Prayer when she stays close to the letter of the score. (Ornamentation is not always finely handled.) Alas, neither singer seems comfortable in the duet of reconciliation from Armida, ‘Amor! possente nume!’, which formed part of the Rome ending and which this production inserts between Otello’s entry into the bedchamber and the murder sequence from the original version.
Both the Iago, Gregory Bonfatti, and the Rodrigo, Simon Edwards, acquit themselves well in the viscerally exciting duets and trios but Bonfatti is less effective in the lengthy ‘temptation’ scene in Act 2 where he delivers the recitatives more like a challenge – the delivery brazen and unvarying – than an act of entrapment.
The live theatre recording has all the usual drawbacks – bumps, bangs, intrusive applause, a few oddities of balance – but most of the time the focus of the sound itself is first-rate. The Orchestra Internazionale d’Italia isn’t a great ensemble but it has some wonderful individual wind players who do full justice to the writing Rossini provided for the fabled virtuosos of his Naples orchestra. Paolo Arrivabeni conducts with a good deal of flair and imagination. In this respect, he is closer to Jesus Lopez-Cobos, on the memorable 1978 Philips studio recording with Carreras and von Stade, than to the rather more circumspect David Parry on Opera Rara.
The new set is on three full-price CDs. It comes with a decent background essay and an English/Italian libretto. It would be difficult, however, to recommended it to all but the most historically minded collectors. The Opera Rara set, which is also on three full-price CDs, provides both endings and as much of the Pasta/Malibran Otello as it is useful to hear. For those who simply want a great Rossini Otello, superbly produced, the two-CD mid-price Philips set conducted by Lopez-Cobos is still the one to have