Outside Italy Franco Alfano is known only for having written the closing scene of Puccini's Turandot, and that completion, according to taste disappointingly or tactfully anonymous, is unlikely to spur interest in his own works. Even such an accomplished and committed a recording of Risurrezione as this one is not quite sufficient a basis for assessing his talent. Although it was his most widely performed opera it is relatively early (he was 29 an age at which Puccini had achieved only Le Villi) and in the opinion of those few who can claim to know the majority of Alfano's output it is inferior to the much later La leggenda di Sakuntala, for long unperformed (and thus losing its place in the repertory) because the performing material was destroyed during the Second World War.
So in listening to Risurrezione we should be hoping, perhaps, for a promising work, not a lost masterpiece. Promise it certainly has, but fulfilment seems a little way off. The choice of subject (Tolstoy's novel), and the fact that Alfano had studied in France and Germany, and travelled in Russia (part of Risurrezione was written there) might lead one to expect a refreshingly new and cosmopolitan voice. Not really; not yet, anyway: it is Italian verismo, very much in the style of Giordano, with surprisingly little local colour (some bells and a Russian-style Easter chant apart) and very little detailed response to Tolstoy's world. In his novel, the heroine Katiusha's dilemma (shall she marry the nobleman who once 'ruined' her or stay with the saintly Simonson, whom she doesn't love but who gave her back her self-respect?.) is given depth and poignancy by Tolstoy's social and religious concerns. In a standard model Italian opera she is simply the suffering diva who in Act 4 inexplicably opts for the sanctimonious baritone rather than the ardent tenor.
There's ample Italianate singing line to make up for this, though at this stage it's a rather generalized lyricism: plenty of good ideas emerge from the melodic flux, but few are satisfyingly extended or developed, and the consequence is a lack of the sort of tune that can haunt you for days and ensure the immortality of even an inferior opera. Moments of delicate orchestral writing, the use in Katiusha's prayer in Act 2 of a melody that's too angular to be memorable but which graphically portrays her anguish, the birth at last in Act 4 of an ample 'resurrection motive'—all these are intriguing pointers to what needs investigation next: Alfano's mature style, in which he reportedly managed a successful fusion of Italianate melody and a harmonic language derived from Debussy and Ravel. But in Risurrezione he already has a knack of finding grateful pretexts for passionate, even melodramatic declamation. It was this which led a succession of lirico spinto sopranos to keep the opera in the repertory for half a century: it's a superb vehicle for a singer with real histrionic resource to whom going wildly over the top once in a while is no problem. It might have been written, in short, for Magda Olivero. Every excuse for tears in the voice, for the vocal equivalent of wrung hands, piteous gesture and haughty defiance is seized on by this consummate singer-actress of the old school (she was in her late fifties when she made this live radio broadcast but you would never guess it). Like so many other Italian operas of the period, Risurrezione is incomplete without a true prima donna to breathe an illusion of life into the two-dimensional central role I and although Olivero cannot give Katiusha the third dimension she lacks, her illusionism is consummate.
The other characters are cyphers by comparison, though Gismondo, a useful and not excessively stentorian tenor, makes the most of what chances are given him; the performance as a whole is full-blooded. The rather coarse and restricted mono recording, with lots of tape hiss, sounds a good deal older than it is, but although the voices are a touch edgy at times they are in clear, forward focus and Olivero's impassioned delivery in particular is transmitted at full force. The fill-up, Alfano's conclusion to Turandot in the form it had before Toscanini took a pair of vicious scissors to it, is robbed of any real interest by the hopelessly unfocused recording: the soloists are impossibly remote, the chorus still more distant, the orchestra fuzzy. Was the microphone under the stage or in someone's waistcoat pocket?'