Cherishable chance to hear an oddity

Adelson e Salvini Barbican Hall

This is known in the trade as a “Wexford” opera – something of obscure historical interest and modest aesthetic merit, suitable for exhumation at the unique opera festival in that town, but not a runner in the bigger wider world.

In this case, however, Opera Rara – an organisation nobly dedicated to the revival of 19th-century operatic oddities – has got there first.

So here is Vincenzo Bellini’s first work for the theatre, written in 1824-5 while he was still a student, never professionally staged in Britain and only seldom elsewhere.

The plot will not bear examination. In the unlikely setting of 17th-century Ireland, Nelly is betrothed to Lord Adelson, a friend to the hysterical Italian painter Salvini whose secret infatuation with Nelly is exploited by Struley, a villain seeking revenge on Adelson.

The intrigue ends happily, sort of, because this belongs to a type of early 19th- Daniella Barcellona as Nelly century opera known as “semi-seria”, in which comic, romantic and melodramatic elements are promiscuously mixed and a potential catastrophe finally averted.

Rossini’s La Gazza Ladra, a major hit in the early 1820s, may well have been the example of this mongrel genre that most affected Bellini. Rossini is certainly the dominant influence over a score which imitates several of his trademarks, including passages of virile coloratura for the tenor, nonsense arias for a farcical buffo bass and a faster-and-louder choral finale.

Opera Rara’s concert performance was excellent, however, and Bellini’s admirers will be grateful for a chance to hear this naïve music. Enea Scala, a tenor familiar to Glyndebourne audiences, was stylistically elegant and technically secure as the volatile Salvini and Maurizio Muraro raised the odd chortle as the bumbling servant Bonifacio. The remainder of the cast, including Daniella Barcellona’s soft-grained Nelly, was adequate. But the evening’s most impressive element was the finely judged conducting of Daniele Rustioni – like Muti or Mackerras, he knows how to give such music propulsion while allowing it dignity.