Rossini: Demetrio e Polibio – Rovaris

Rossini was eighteen, maybe twenty — nobody can quite pin the date down, least of all Rossini himself, who later fibbed about having written the thing at fifteen, presumably to burnish the prodigy myth he was already cultivating. Demetrio e Polibio has always occupied an odd corner of the catalogue: numbered first among his operas, staged fourth, and composed under conditions so haphazard — a commissioning family of touring singers, a libretto arriving in dribs and drabs from the pen of Domenico Mombelli’s wife, quite possibly patched here and there by Mombelli himself — that its coherence as a finished dramatic object has never been its strong suit. What it has instead, in its best pages, is that unmistakable spring in the harmonic step, the melodic profile already sharpening toward the composer who would give us Tancredi within a year.

The plot, lifted at some remove from Metastasio, creaks. Two kings squabble over a young man’s parentage while his sister — or is she his beloved, the libretto keeps you guessing longer than it should — sorts out the emotional stakes for everyone. Opera seria of this vintage runs on recognition scenes and vocal display rather than psychological nuance, and nobody should come to this release looking for the dramaturgical sophistication of Otello or Semiramide. But listened to on its own terms, as an apprentice work already flexing unexpected muscle, it rewards patience, particularly in the ensembles, where the teenage Rossini shows an instinct for layering voices.

This Pesaro cast brings considerable starch to the enterprise. Yijie Shi, in the trouser-adjacent role of Demetrio disguised as Eumene, sings with the bright, forward tenor placement that Rossini’s coloratura writing demands. The divisions in his solo numbers arrive cleanly articulated, not smeared into approximate runs. There’s real squillo up top. If the middle register occasionally thins under pressure, that’s a small price given how few tenors today can manage this repertoire’s stratospheric demands without resorting to bluster.

Victoria Zaytseva’s Siveno carries the opera’s emotional weight, such as it is, and her mezzo has the requisite agility along with a chest voice that doesn’t sound bolted on for effect. Mirco Palazzi brings gravity and a firm, dark line to Polibio, no small achievement in a role that could easily read as merely functional, a plot device with a beard.

The orchestra plays with the lean, transparent textures the Rossini Opera Festival has cultivated for decades now. Textures alone cannot disguise the fact that some of the accompanied recitative moves at a crawl that tests one’s goodwill. Pacing in opera seria of this period is a genuine interpretive problem: push too hard and you falsify the idiom, hold back too much and the audience checks its watch. This interpretation mostly finds the right side of that line. Not always.

One does wish, and not for the first time with Pesaro’s recent history, that the visual conception — I speak from the DVD evidence, since these things travel together whether we like it or not — showed more faith in the material as written. The festival’s determination to reinvent every rediscovery as some kind of directorial statement piece has become almost a house style, and it does no favors to a work already struggling to establish its own dramatic identity. Let the singers sing Rossini. That should be enough, and here, mostly, it is.

Where does this leave the piece in the discography? There isn’t much competition — a scholarly enterprise with limited previous representation on disc, so this recording essentially defines the modern hearing of the opera for now. Given the general dearth of alternatives, and given performances of this caliber from the principals, that’s not a bad thing at all. Recommended, with the usual caveats about early Rossini’s dramatic limitations firmly in place. Go for the singing, stay for the surprising flashes of the master still finding his voice.