Consider the stamina shown just over 200 years ago in Vienna, when after listening to a three-hour opera (presumably plus a pause between the two acts) Leopold II ordered the work to be repeated in its entirety after an interval for supper. Assuming at least an hour for this (probably longer), the evening’s entertainment must have extended over about nine hours – almost awe-inspiring in this sound-bite era of ours. It is understandable, at any rate, that Leopold was delighted with his new Kapellmeister Cimarosa’s Matrimonio segreto (his fifty-third stage work), for, as Hanslick was later to remark, it is “full of sunshine”. Its melodic invention and rhythmic vitality seem inexhaustible, its scoring is colourful, and the plot is not too involved to be followed with ease (a thousand pities that the present recording provides no translation!). It indeed lacks Mozart’s more adventurous harmony and textures (which goes to explain why this comedy was more popular than Mozart’s at the time), but in compensation it is most expertly constructed, with an unusually large number of ensembles, and with extended finales that build up to great effect.
My enthusiasm for the now 20-year-old recording by Barenboim remains undiminished, but this new issue has much to commend it. Gabriele Bellini, whom RO panned for a recent Barbiere (Chandos, 12/95), paces the work admirably and secures alert playing from an orchestra I had not previously encountered, whose response to dynamic shadings and readiness to point forte-piano accents are most laudable: as a result, the music trips along with vivacity and sparkle. The cast, mostly experienced Rossinians, show a good understanding of the post-Mozartian style required, and enter wholeheartedly into their characters. Susan Patterson is an appealing heroine, affectionate-sounding with her clandestine husband, and truly affecting in the accompanied recitative in which she contemplates being forced to enter a convent. As her elder sister, whom the Count has contracted to marry but rejects at his first sight of the embarrassed Carolina (yet whom, in the story’s one improbability, he ends up reluctantly accepting – though what Elisetta thinks of this humiliating position is left unsaid), Janet Williams is brilliant, especially in her big bravura aria “Se son vendicata”: the unseemly squabble between the sisters in Act 1 is acted out with spirit. Gloria Banditelli makes less of her characterization, and isn’t entirely at ease at the repeated Fs in her one aria. Alfonso Antoniozzi displays a talent for patter-technique in the role of the grasping social-climbing father, and Petteri Salomaa is excellent as the Count – aristocratic at his entry, convincingly self-accusatory when trying his utmost to deter Elisetta: the dispute between the two at the start of Act 2 was a show-stopper at the original performance. Which leaves only William Matteuzzi, and here it has to be said that he is far outshone by Ryland Davies on the Barenboim set: for all the firmness and metal in his voice, his initial exchanges with his secret wife do not sound tender, as marked and expected; and in the duet with the Count, “Signor, deh concedete” his tone, already rather edgy, becomes tight.
The one real blot on this issue is the dreadfully fussy continuo (played on fortepiano) in the recitatives, not only irritatingly intrusive but at times actually submerging the words to which it is supposed to offer discreet minimal support. However, at super-bargain price this is worth putting up with for the sake of the rest.'