Pergolesi: La Salustia – Rovaris

Boy soprano, castrato, prima donna — for two centuries the roles have gotten reassigned, reshuffled, sometimes just abandoned, and La Salustia has spent most of that time in the vault. Worth asking why. This new release only partly answers the question.

Pergolesi wrote the thing at twenty-one, a Neapolitan conservatory boy given his shot at the big time: opera seria, the genre that separated the men from the students. If the results are uneven, so was he — dead of consumption five years later, before he’d had the chance to become the composer we think we know from the Stabat Mater and the endlessly recycled Pergolesi of Stravinsky’s Pulcinella. Everything from La Salustia on had a shadow hanging over it. You can hear him reaching in this score. Not always arriving. Occasionally landing somewhere startling.

The plot, based loosely on Roman history filtered through some very loose Neapolitan libretto conventions, concerns an empress accused, a father scheming, a marriage nearly wrecked — the usual dynastic wreckage dressed up in da capo arias. Nobody watches opera seria for the plot. You watch it, when it works, for the long arcs of vocal line, the moments where a singer has to sustain an emotional temperature across two hundred bars with almost nothing but ornament and breath control to work with.

Here the singing mostly delivers. Serena Malfi’s Salustia carries real weight, a mezzo with body to the middle register and enough flexibility up top not to sound strained by Pergolesi’s more athletic writing, though I’d have wanted a touch more desperation in her Act II lament, an aria that with a slower tempo and a more anguished attack could crack your sternum. Laura Polverelli as Giulia brings sharper edges, a voice with grain in it. I liked her better the longer the opera went on, actually, as though she was warming into the drama’s absurdities rather than fighting them. Florin Cezar Ouatu sings Alessandro with the kind of bright, slightly metallic countertenor tone some listeners resist. I didn’t mind it, though there were stretches where the coloratura got away from him, smudged rather than articulated.

Vittorio Prato’s Marziano — the one tenor voice in a cast otherwise built from sopranos and mezzos, an imbalance typical of the period but still strange to modern ears trained on Verdi’s baritone villains — sounds firm, a little dry, dramatically alert even when the stage direction gives him little to do beyond glower.

And the staging does ask you to make allowances. A single set, costumes and lighting doing the work of scenery, and then this business of singers writing on the walls, changing costume in view of the audience, exits and entrances that seem to comment on the drama rather than advance it. Is it Personenregie or is it directorial nervousness, a fear that eighteenth-century opera seria simply won’t hold an audience unassisted? I went back and forth. There’s nothing offensive in it, nothing of the Regietheater outrages Salzburg or Bayreuth audiences have learned to steel themselves against. But nothing especially illuminating either. Mostly it’s just there, a frame around performances that don’t actually need the help.

Corrado Rovaris and I Virtuosi Italiani play with real snap, string articulation crisp, tempos alive, none of the sludgy Baroque-lite conducting that used to pass for period style before Hogwood and Harnoncourt taught everyone better. The continuo harpsichord, though, is balanced far too forward in the mix, every strum and flourish shoved into your face like a headwaiter clearing his throat. Charming for about ten minutes. Then you start wishing for a fader.

Discographically this opera has almost no competition, which is itself the real story here, more than any single rendition choice. Pergolesi’s fame rests almost entirely on a handful of works; the rest of his catalog, including three further opere serie, remains a kind of scholarly rumor. So there’s no Muti version to measure this against, no classic 1970s studio release to genuflect toward. This is the library shelf, for now.

Recommended, then. Not as a first choice among Baroque opera on video, where Handel and Vivaldi still rule the roost, but as a genuine document, well sung, decently played, and worth an evening’s curiosity from anyone who thought they already knew Pergolesi from the Stabat Mater and nothing else.