Donizetti Opera Fantasies – Fornito and Howell

Every era gets the Donizetti it deserves, and the nineteenth century’s flute virtuosi apparently decided he deserved a workout. This disc — a small archaeological dig into the salons and conservatory recital rooms of Naples, Florence, and points north — reminds us that opera in the 1830s and ‘40s did not stay put in the theater. It got poached, arranged, filleted, and reassembled by every instrumentalist with fingers fast enough to keep up, and flutists were the worst offenders. Or the best, depending on your tolerance for moto perpetuo passagework standing in for bel canto’s long line.

Giuseppe Rabboni’s fantasy on Linda di Chamounix opens the program in a mood that can only be called overheated. There’s a curious Beethovenian scowl to the introduction — fist-clenched, minor-key, almost aggrieved — before it dissolves into cascades of thirty-second notes that have nothing to do with Beethoven and everything to do with keeping an 1840s audience awake through intermission. Gilberto Fornito handles the acrobatics gamely. He digs into the arpeggios with real conviction, though the top register occasionally thins to something closer to piccolo than flute — a tendency that recurs disconcertingly throughout the disc.

Briccialdi’s La Figlia del Reggimento fantasy, op. 27, is the disc’s genuine find. Briccialdi himself invented the thumb key that’s on every Boehm-system flute made since — practical men, these virtuoso composers — and his writing here is fiendish in a way that flatters an accomplished player without humiliating a good one. Fornito is at his best in the moto perpetuo sections: fleet, articulate, unwilling to blur triplets into technicolor smudge the way lesser players do. It’s genuinely brilliant, and one wonders why it isn’t better known.

Tonassi and the Osborne–Tulou collaboration on L’Elisir d’Amore are, frankly, filler — pleasant, competently turned, forgettable by the time the disc moves on. Salon music without much salon left in it. I don’t hold this against Fornito or against pianist Christopher Howell, who also supplies useful, occasionally chatty liner notes in English and Italian; some repertoire simply doesn’t have secrets to reveal no matter how sympathetically it’s played.

Donizetti’s own Flute Sonata in C, composed when he was barely twenty-two and still absorbing Rossini’s example, is the disc’s quiet center — a piece that begins in shadowed uncertainty and takes flight only gradually, like a singer warming into an aria over the course of an act. It’s slight, but it’s real Donizetti, unmediated by an arranger’s ego, and Fornito plays it with an unforced tenderness that the fantasies, for all their glitter, never quite achieve.

Carl Joachim Andersen’s Lucia di Lammermoor transcription, op. 45 no. 6, is a nice reminder that the Danish flute tradition — Andersen taught at the Royal Danish Orchestra and later founded the Copenhagen Conservatory — had its own appetite for Italian opera repurposed as étude. It’s slighter than the Briccialdi but sits well here, lightly sprung, almost conversational.

John Clinton closes matters with two numbers from Don Pasquale — “Com’è gentil” and “La mora in tutto questo” — done up gently, without fuss, a nightcap after the pyrotechnics. Clinton was an odd figure, an Irish flutist who feuded loudly with Boehm over fingering systems and mostly lost the argument to history; here at least his transcriptions earn their keep.

Balance is the disc’s chief technical flaw — the piano sits well back and to one side, as if Howell had wandered partway out of the room, and Fornito’s occasional intakes of breath and a slightly phlegmy attack register more prominently than ideal engineering would allow. None of this sinks the enterprise. Put the disc on as background music, half-listening, and you’ll find yourself drawn in anyway — not merely by pretty tunes lovingly stroked, but by the sheer, slightly mad ingenuity of musicians who saw an opera and thought: yes, but what if a flute did that.

Not an essential disc, but a genuinely interesting one — recommended to anyone curious about how thoroughly Donizetti’s melodies colonized the instrumental imagination of his century.