Donizetti: Don Gregorio – Montanari

Somewhere in the vast, sprawling, half-forgotten Donizetti catalogue lies a joke nobody has bothered to finish telling — until now, more or less.

Don Gregorio began life as L’ajo nell’imbarazzo, a Roman farce Donizetti tossed off in 1824 with the ink barely dry before he moved on to the next commission. That was his way. Sixty-some operas in a career that ran perhaps twenty-five years, and he wrote most of them the way a journeyman carpenter builds a staircase — quickly, competently, without excessive brooding over the grain of the wood. Then Naples wanted the piece for the Teatro Nuovo, where audiences liked their comedy served in dialect, thick and unapologetic. Donizetti obliged. Recitatives became spoken prose. The tutor of the title got his vowels flattened and his consonants roughened into something the Roman version never had. And the piece succeeded, the kind of success Donizetti had been chasing since Zoraida di Granata put his name on the board in Rome back in 1822, when he was not yet twenty-five and still uncertain whether the theater would have him.

He was a young man in a hurry. He had reason to be: dead at fifty-one, syphilis eating away at his mind years before it finished the job on his body, the last stretch of his life spent in something closer to absence than existence. It is worth remembering, listening to the antic silliness of Don Gregorio, that its composer would not live to be old.

The plot itself is pure commedia bones dressed in early nineteenth-century clothing. A misogamist marquis, Don Giulio Antiquati, wants his two grown sons kept ignorant of women until they’re forty. Enter the tutor Gregorio, tasked with an impossible pedagogical mission, and Leonarda the flirtatious housekeeper, and Enrico’s secretly wedded wife Gilda with an infant in tow, and the inevitable comedy of mistaken identity, concealed marriages, and a tutor eventually got up, improbably, as a nurse. It’s Goldoni-adjacent stuff, filtered through the specific alchemy that made Neapolitan farce its own animal: quicker, coarser than its Roman cousin, less concerned with wit than with velocity.

Paolo Bordogna, who has made something of a specialty of Donizetti’s comic basses and baritones on records these past fifteen years, sings Gregorio with the kind of buffo intelligence that never curdles into mere mugging. You can hear him listening to the other singers, adjusting, needling. His diction in the Neapolitan passages has real bite to it, consonants like little percussive accents against the orchestra’s chatter. Whether the accent itself would satisfy a native of the Spaccanapoli, I couldn’t begin to tell you; I wasn’t there in 1826, and neither was anyone currently drawing a paycheck.

Alessandra Fratelli’s Leonarda has the necessary tartness, a voice with some vinegar in it, used cannily, never just loud for loudness’ sake. Elizaveta Martirosyan brings a clean, forward sound to Gilda that cuts through ensemble textures without strain. The three of them remain individually recognizable across the long stretches of concertato writing where Donizetti, following the Rossinian model he never entirely escaped, piles voice on voice into a comic traffic jam. That’s not nothing. Buffo ensembles live or die on whether you can tell who’s shouting what at whom, and here, mostly, you can.

Where the album frustrates has nothing to do with the singing and everything to do with presentation. The track listing offers only the first character to enter in each number, leaving listeners to guess who’s doing what to whom for long stretches of ensemble writing. A synopsis exists, dutifully, but floats untethered from the timings, so you’re left flipping pages and squinting at a booklet while Bordogna and company barrel through some plot turn you’ve just missed the setup for. It’s a small thing. It matters anyway — comedy depends on knowing the joke as it lands, not three minutes later after you’ve reconstructed it from context.

Competing recordings of the piece are not exactly thick on the ground; Don Gregorio has never had the currency of L’elisir or Don Pasquale, and probably never will. Which is precisely the argument for recordings like this one. This Don Gregorio does the job with real charm, some vocal distinction, and a documentation problem that a more careful hand at the record label could have fixed in an afternoon. Buy it for the singing. Keep the libretto within reach, and maybe a flashlight.