Verdi's 1857 Simon Boccanegra | Out on 21 March | Sir Mark Elder, The Hallé, Chorus of Opera North

Описание: More info: https://opera-rara.com/

To be released on 21 March 2025.

On Friday 21 March, Opera Rara releases the first ever studio recording of the original 1857 version of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra (ORC65). For this recording, Opera Rara teamed up with its former Artistic Director Sir Mark Elder, The Hallé and the choruses of Opera North and the Royal Northern College of Music. Argentinean baritone Germán Enrique Alcántara takes up the title role and is joined by Japanese soprano Eri Nakamura as Amelia and British bass William Thomas as Jacopo Fiesco. All three singers make their studio opera recording debuts on this release. The role of Gabriele Adorno is sung by Peruvian tenor Iván Ayón-Rivas who returns to Opera Rara following his recording debut on the charity’s International Opera Award-winning release of Mercadante’s Il proscritto (ORC62).

Simon Boccanegra, which first premiered at Venice’s Teatro La Fenice in 1857, was a boldly experimental work, featuring simpler, more declamatory vocal lines than those in Il trovatore or La traviata, the great successes of earlier in the decade. It was partly for this reason that, in spite of some successful productions supervised by the composer, the opera failed to circulate, and that, more than 20 years later, Verdi was persuaded by his publisher to revise the work. This second version, first performed in 1881, is the Simon Boccanegra that took its place in the Verdi ‘canon’, obscuring completely his 1857 version.

This latest revival from Opera Rara is based on a new edition of the 1857 version of Verdi’s opera prepared by Repertoire Consultant Roger Parker for Casa Ricordi. It is the first to be based on the composer’s original autograph score, which only recently became available to scholars. The project was spearheaded by Parker together with Sir Mark Elder, for whom the wish to shine a new light on this music, marking as it does a critical period in Verdi’s development, goes back to his time as Opera Rara’s Artistic Director (2011-2019). As Parker notes in his recording booklet essay:
“When it is performed with commitment and an awareness of its stylistic peculiarities, hearing the original Boccanegra can, in short, lead us to confront important questions, ones that might even extend to the whole issue of whether Verdi’s revisions are, as well as re-imaginings, invariably improvements… Times change, and with them change the meanings that we can extract from works of art. The ‘old’ Boccanegra might, in this context, quite suddenly become fresh and ‘new’, adapted to our times just as urgently as was its successor.”

Opera Rara, best known for its restoration and revival of bel canto operas, particularly those of Donizetti, collaborated in the early 2000’s with the BBC to distribute a series of five historic recordings of Verdi ‘firsts’ on CD. These live recordings from the 1970s produced by the BBC included the original 1857 version of Simon Boccanegra which is now no longer available. Opera Rara recorded Simon Boccanegra a week prior to a concert performance at Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall in April 2024 which received five stars from The Times, The Daily Telegraph and Bachtrack, amongst others, and was described by Opera as “a monumental performance, and another worthy revival by Opera Rara” and a “ground-breaking collaborative event” by The Arts Desk.