Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848)
Dalinda (1838)
Dalinda: Lidia Fridman (soprano)
Ildemaro: Luciano Ganci (tenor)
Acmet: Paolo Bordogna (baritone)
Ugo d’Asti: Yajie Zhang (mezzo-soprano)
Chor und Orchester der Berliner Operngruppe/Felix Krieger
rec. live, 14 May 2023, Großer Saal, Konzerthaus, Berlin, Germany
World premiere recording
Italian only libretto
Oehms Classics OC989 [102]
Dalinda was the result of Donizetti’s attempt in the Spring of 1834 to bring Lucrezia Borgia to Naples. The opera had been reasonably well received the previous year in Milan, but the Neapolitan censor was….well, highly censorious. He was especially outraged by the spectacle of Christian Frankish knights being invited to a peace banquet by an Islamic ruler only to be assassinated by poisoned wine. Four years of fretting over the adaptations demanded of Felice Romani’s libretto without receiving approval, a disappointment compounded by the banning of his new opera, Poliuto, and the insistence that he make substantial changes to its replacement, Pia de’ Tolomei, led to Donizetti becoming so angry and frustrated that he abandoned the score in the summer of 1838 and moved shortly thereafter to Paris where he was better appreciated. Dalinda lay forgotten in the archives and bits of it were lost or sold off, until musicologist Eleonora Di Cintio came across the remains and spent years painstakingly reassembling it from various sources and reconstructing it into a performable edition; it received its world premiere in Berlin in 2023, 185 years after its completion and this is the recording of that semi-staged production.
It is understandably similar in plot and much of its music to Lucrezia Borgia, but the setting has been transposed from 16C Venice to Persia during the Third Crusade and a fair amount of the music in the third and fourth acts was newly composed, including a female chorus, a long aria for the tenor Ildemaro and an arioso he sings before dying. The author of the notes and the performers are at pains to establish its modern relevance by emphasising its theme of religious intolerance and its prescience in depicting the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East. Well, maybe; but it is clearly true that even if to some degree it is capitalising upon the already established fascination of that era with “exotic” Ottoman settings, such as in Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail and several of Rossini’s operas, its depiction of historical and social context breaks new ground and it is daring in its inclusion of potentially scandalous events such as Christian men tearing off a Muslim woman’s veil and her bearing of a child by a Christian father before her second marriage to the Islamic potentate and the resultant clash of her divided loyalties. No wonder the censor got sweaty.
Not all of Donizetti’s operas are worthy of revival – he was a genius, yes, but also a compulsive workaholic who wrote too much too fast – so I approached this reconstruction armed with a degree of scepticism balanced by the fact that its predecessor, Lucrezia Borgia upon which Dalinda was based, is one of his finest operas. The performers here are the privately funded Berliner Operngruppe, founded in 2010 by their conductor Felix Krieger, which annually presents operatic rarities. The orchestra and cast are made up of professional freelance musicians, many of whom are recent graduates from music conservatories. There are four principal roles as per above and several smaller roles for male singers (see below).
The booklet offers a synopsis in German and English, a full libretto in Italian and some nice colour photos of the production. An English translation would have been helpful for non-Italian speakers but having the full text at all these days is an unexpected bonus and the synopsis is quite detailed. However, first impressions upon starting to read it are skewed by the fact that someone has failed to proofread the very first stage directions in Italian and a whole paragraph has been repeated. As an editor and proofreader, I am always aghast when such obvious things slip through. Likewise the first letter of tenor Fermin Basterra’s capitalised forename in the biographies has been cut off, so he is called “Ermin”. Then I start to find mistakes in the libretto; for example, Dalinda’s “tutte le colpe nel suo figlio oblio” at the end of Scene 2 becomes “tutte le cole nel suo figlio obli”, then her last exchange with Corboga is cut off. Send me the proofs, guys; I’ll check ‘em for the love of it rather than see a worthy project so compromised by such carelessness. Sigh.
Anyway, to the music: noble horns in the very first bars of the Prelude, neat ensemble and sensitive dynamics in impeccable sound promise much of the orchestra and conducting. The celebratory music is nicely distanced and first impressions of the voices assembled are equally promising: not a wobbler to be heard, in Yajie Zhang we hear a mezzo with proper lower register development and a secure top, a lead tenor with ping and squillo – wow; it’s enough to restore my flagging faith in modern conservatories to turn out authentic opera voices. A rousing chorus concludes the short but pithy opening scene. My sole criticism is that the Italian diction of some singers could be crisper.
Enter Lidia Fridman as Dalinda: she has a big, supple voice with just a little more oscillation in her vibrato than is ideal but it’s not uncomfortable and her powerful upper extension is a delight, balanced by a really solid, booming lower register. She pours out a stream of warm tone but also invests her singing with real feeling. Felix Krieger supports her – indeed all the singers – very considerately, giving her time to wrap her sizeable voice around the cantilena line – and she even has a trill. Her first aria will be familiar to those who know Sutherland’s and Caballé’s studio recordings of Lucrezia Borgia, as is Ildemaro’s “Di pescatore ignobile”. Compared with distinguished predecessors Alfredo Kraus and Jaume Aragall, Luciano Ganci does not have an especially refined timbre or indeed a subtle delivery but he sings out with passion. Occasionally he sounds as if he is forcing and his tone blares but at many other times he is impressive. The music of the final ensemble of the act, culminating in the outrage of the ripping off of Dalinda’s veil, is also familiar from the original source and Fridman bids fair to rival the virtuosity of those aforementioned divas by holding and swelling her sustained A-flat for almost half a minute, then capping that feat with a superb, held, top C-sharp.
For my joy to be complete, all I need is a good baritone to sing Acmet, the jealous, vengeful, murderous husband – and in Paolo Bordogna, that is what we get: a dark, ductile, slightly buzzing sound with plenty of heft. Like all the young singers here, he is not especially elegant but that quality is learned and developed as they mature into their careers; what matters is that their voices have good foundations and do not rely upon forcing or constriction to generate volume. (He, too, suffers the indignity of losing a few lines of recitativo in the libretto, and some other little bits at the end of other scenes are also lost.) The battle between husband and wife in Act II, as accusation, threat and counter-threat are batted to and fro, is highly dramatic and very well sung, requiring considerable vocal stamina; by contrast, the trio (track 10) is a splendid example of Donizetti’s flowing lyricism.
The new aria for Ildemaro, “Deh, gran Dio!”, is not top-drawer Donizetti, being rather conventional; Ganci makes the best of it but audibly tires in the cabaletta of track 16. In compensation, Fridman’s second top C-sharp on “Spietato!” (Cruel!), as she tries to persuade her son to drink the antidote to the poison which carries him off, is a scorcher.
All in all, this is one of the most successful revivals of its kind I have encountered in recent years, providing an hour and a half of thoroughly enjoyable and entertaining Grand Opera, packed with melody and drama, performed by highly talented young artists with zeal and expertise.
Ralph Moore
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Other cast
Corboga: David Oštrek (bass-baritone)
Elmelik: Andrès Moreno Garcia (tenor)
Garniero: Kangyoon Shine Lee (tenor)
Ridolfo: Egor Sergeev (baritone)
Ubaldo: Kento Uchiyama (bass-baritone)
Guglielmo: Fermin Basterra (tenor)
