This long, loud, intermittently violent, occasionally funny melodramma giocoso was written by Rossini for Rome’s Apollo Theatre during the carnival season of 1821. In many respects, it is a backward looking piece, the last in a long line of semiseria operas written by Rossini in Italy. Its scale, though, is something else. Matilde di Shabran is not in the same league of sophistication and skill as Il viaggio a Reims (Paris, 1825) or its elegant and witty distillation Le comte Ory (Paris, 1828), but the very massiveness of the piece (the splendid 15-minute Act 1 Quintet, the huge Act 1 finale, the thrilling 10-minute Act 2 Sextet) shows how Rossini’s experience of writing epic opere serie for the San Carlo, Naples had turned this dab hand at comic imbroglio into the Grand Panjandrum of Italian music.
The Rome premiere of Matilde di Shabran was something of a fiasco. Rossini didn’t complete the score in time (Giovanni Pacini was drafted in to lend a hand) and what there was had a deleterious effect on the health of the Apollo Theatre’s music director who died of apoplexy during the rehearsals. Paganini conducted in his place.
In the autumn of 1821, Rossini arranged performances of the now all-Rossini Matilde di Shabran in Naples; Giovanni David sang the choleric hero, Corradino, and the important buffo role of Isidoro, the loony poet, was recast in Neapolitan dialect for local favourite, Carlo Casaccia. In 1822, Rossini took the opera to Vienna: the Naples edition, with the Isidoro’s role translated back into intelligible Italian. It is this Vienna edition, shorn of a good deal of secco recitative, that is used on the present recording.
Beethoven’s amanuensis, Anton Schindler quotes the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung on the subject of the Vienna production: ‘It was really enough, more than enough. The entire performance was like an idolatrous orgy; everyone acted there as if he had been bitten by a tarantula; the shouting, crying, yelling of “viva” and “fora” went on and on.’
That is well put. There is a frenetic quality about Matilde di Shabran. There is also nothing the least bit attractive about the opera’s belligerent, woman-hating anti-hero, Corradino (even the aforementioned tarantula might be impressed by his ability gratuitously to inflict pain) though he gets his come-uppance from the shrewish Matilde, Edoardo (a travesti role), son of his old enemy Raimondo, and the loony poet who declines to push Matilde into a ravine, not so much on moral grounds as on aesthetic ones.
The opera’s first modern revival was in Genoa in 1974 (LPs were issued at the time). Bruno Martinotti conducted, Rolando Panerai played the poet, Domenico Trimarchi was a distinguished Aliprando. The 1996 Pesaro Festival staging boasted a stronger all-round cast with Elizabeth Futral as Matilde, Juan Diego Florez as Corradino, and Bruno Pratico as the poet. This 1998 Wildbad production has an appropriately waspish Corradino, a fine Aliprando and an even finer Edoardo. Akie Amou’s Matilde is both charming and exasperating. Her no-holds-barred singing of Rossini’s fatuous Act 2 finale brings pleasure and pain in more or less equal measure.
I Virtuosi di Praga is an experienced Rossini ensemble characterfully (if occasionally a little too pressingly) conducted by Francesco Corti. As live recordings go, this is better than most without being in any sense first-rate. Text and translation and excellent notes come in separate booklets, so the presentation is good. It is the performance (and the music) which are rather more hit-and-miss.'