Piccinni: LAmericano – Ciofi, Edwards, Hull

Somebody, somewhere, had to record this. Full credit to the Festival della Valle d’Itria, which has made excavation of the buried Neapolitan repertory something like a civic mission, for giving us the chance to hear it — even if the chance turns out to confirm what scholars have long suspected: Piccinni’s fame outran his invention by a considerable distance, and posterity, on this evidence, called it about right.

The facts of the case are simple enough. Piccinni wrote, by some counts, close to three hundred operas; something like a third of them survive; almost none get performed. He spent decades as the most fashionable composer in Naples and then Rome, crossed to Paris at the invitation of partisans eager to set him up as an alternative to Gluck, and lost that argument so thoroughly that his name became, within a generation, a footnote to somebody else’s revolution in operatic dramaturgy. L’Americano, an intermezzo from 1772, predates the Paris debacle by several years and shows you a composer entirely comfortable in an idiom about to become obsolete.

And comfortable is the word. This is opera buffa by the yard — stock characters, stock situations, the rich buffo suitor who loses the girl and nobly steps aside, secondary lovers whose only real business is to sing prettily until the final ensemble sorts everybody out. You know this machine. Mozart knew this machine intimately and then quietly dismantled it from the inside, giving Bartolo and Osmin and Leporello inner lives nobody asked for and everybody remembers. Piccinni doesn’t dismantle anything. He runs the machine as designed, competently, tunefully, and — this is the damning word — forgettably.

Domenico Colaianni sings Cavaliere Lisandro with a nice comic bounce in the voice, the buffo patter articulated cleanly, no mudding of the fioriture. “Questo è il regno delle femmine,” his Act 2 tirade against the tyranny of women, gets something close to real theatrical snap — you can hear him relishing the moment, milking a few consonants for laughs. But the aria itself gives him almost nothing to work with beyond generic harrumphing, the kind of number Piccinni could presumably toss off before breakfast. Simon Edwards, as the American of the title (a novelty role for 1772, exoticism of a distinctly transatlantic kind), has an ingratiating, easy tenor — his Act 1 aria is genuinely lovely to sit through — but the material is thin, and here’s the real problem: his timbre sits so close to Colaianni’s baritone that in ensemble the two men blur into a single vague male voice. That’s a casting issue as much as a compositional one, but it doesn’t help.

Patrizia Ciofi, an artist I’ve admired in far worthier vehicles — her Adina, her Amina, her exquisite way with Donizettian pathos — brings real sensitivity to “Mi cercano l’agnelle,” Silvia’s Act 1 lament, shaping the line with the kind of soft-grained legato that makes you wish the opera trusted her with more music of that seriousness. Comedy suits her less; there’s an effortfulness to her buffa moments that never quite lifts off. Giovanna Dondadini, as Aurora, is the one singer who seems to have found actual comic timing in the score rather than importing it from outside — her phrasing has spring in it, an unforced wit.

The orchestra, Orchestra Internazionale d’Italia under Eric Hull, plays with evident conviction and rather too much weight. This is 1772; the string writing wants transparency, a period bow’s quickness off the string, air under the phrases. What we get instead is modern-instrument heft that sits on the music like a hand pressing down too hard on a soufflé. And the recorded acoustic — evidently taken live in one of the festival’s outdoor or resonant indoor spaces in Martina Franca — smears detail with a wash of reverberation that turns already generic passagework into mush. I found myself longing for the crispness a good period band, an Il Complesso Barocco or an Accademia Bizantina, might have brought to this same score.

None of this is really the performers’ fault. They serve the piece loyally, sometimes with real charm. The trouble is the piece. Compare L’Americano with anything Piccinni’s Neapolitan contemporary Paisiello wrote in the same genre — La serva padrona‘s DNA runs truer in Paisiello’s own Barbiere, still occasionally revived, than it does here — and you sense immediately what’s missing: melodic profile sharp enough to survive outside its immediate context, harmonic incident, any sense that the composer is surprised by his own material. Piccinni never surprises. He delivers, competently, on schedule, and moves on to the next commission.

Historical curiosity value: considerable. This is a document of taste on the eve of its own supersession, useful to anyone tracing the machinery Mozart later took apart and reassembled into something permanent. Musical revelation: none. File alongside the diligent but ultimately non-essential rediscoveries — worth having in a good library, unlikely to displace anything in your affections. Piccinni remains, as he has for two centuries now, a name historians need and audiences can safely do without.