Under the baton of Rudolf Kempe, the ‘Vienna Philharmonic on Holiday’ recorded the sturdy Kolo (round-dance) from Ero the Joker (reissued on Warner and Testament, 3/98). Croatian opera has not otherwise travelled well, but the German CPO label has begun to redress its international neglect. The recent Munich-based recording of Ero presented a spiky village comedy well worthy of its honoured local status as the nation’s second great opera. Here is the first, a nationalist epic inspired by the Siege of Szigetvár (now part of Hungary) in 1566, which resulted in a pyrrhic victory for the Ottoman invaders on their path to Vienna and a hallowed place in patriotic memory for the resisting forces under the self-sacrificing command of Nikola Šubić Zrinjski.

Ero, first staged in 1935, was the work of the Zagreb Opera’s veteran director, Jakov Gotovac. Zrinjski was composed in 1876 by the company’s Milan-trained first conductor, Ivan Zajc. As a nickname, ‘The Croatian Verdi’ doesn’t seem fair on either composer, except in the central confrontation between the commander and Mehmed, the Sultan’s envoy, where the limpid string-writing and equivocal expression turn the screw in the manner of vulnerable leader-and-father scenes in (for instance) Boccanegra and Otello. The required tragic-heroic close arrives with a call to arms, written a decade previously, which has since become a Croatian Land of hope and glory and a staple of Japanese male-voice choirs.

Playing Zrinjski and his indefatigable spouse with winning chemistry, the real-life couple of Robert and Kristina Kolar lead a generally reliable cast (the warm, well-supported mezzo of Kristina is the star of the show, vocally speaking), unflatteringly recorded with evident compression at climaxes. Anamarija Knego gets off to a pinched start as their daughter Jelena but the bright gleam in her agreeably fluttering soprano wins out over the course of a dramatically ambitious final-act sequence, perhaps struggling with some pedestrian tempos; AljaŽ Farasin sounds young and comparatively taxed as her sweetheart, Juranić. Until his rather blustery death scene, Luka Ortar gives a steadily sung, uncaricatured account of the implacable Suleiman. The chorus, frankly, doesn’t pass muster on record.

The sung text is at some variance from the libretto offered in the booklet but the presentation is otherwise excellent, replete with production images which suggest that a modern and politically sensitive retelling of a patriotic legend is unlikely to find a popular place on Croatian stages any time soon. Reservations over its transfer to disc shouldn’t deter curious readers from investigating a compelling addition to the Romantic canon of nation-building operas such as Heise’s Drot og marsk, Smetana’s Libuše and Gomes’s Il Guarany, even if none of them holds a candle to A Life for the Tsar or Nabucco.