Rossini: Adelaide di Borgogna – Jessica Pratt

Rossini wrote Adelaide di Borgogna under duress, more or less — a Roman impresario breathing down his neck, a Carnival season slipping away, and a libretto by Giovanni Schmidt that asks its audience to swallow tenth-century Italian dynastic squabbles as though they were the stuff of high tragedy. They are not. But Rossini rarely needed a good libretto to write good music, and this opera, shoved to the margins of the repertory for a century and a half, has more sparkle in its vocal writing than its reputation suggests.

The plot creaks. Adelaide, widowed queen, is besieged by the usurper Berengario and his oily son Adalberto, who wants to marry her and consolidate his claim; Ottone, the German emperor, arrives to save the day and — this being opera seria of the old dynastic-marriage variety — falls in love with her along the way. Nobody in the audience will lose sleep over who ends up on which throne. What matters is what Rossini does with three voices pitched against each other in some of the most demanding coloratura writing he ever produced for the female voice, doubled here because both Adelaide and Ottone are cast as high voices in the old Neapolitan-Roman convention: soprano and contralto (or mezzo, as the casting tends to go nowadays) locked in vocal combat rather than romantic duet in any conventional sense.

Jessica Pratt sings Adelaide with real technical assurance. She floats a trill, or something close enough to one, and negotiates the wide leaps of her big scenes without audible strain, though there are moments, particularly in the upper reaches of the Act II writing, where the tone thins to something more silvery than warm. Daniela Barcellona, a veteran of this repertory going back to her Rossini Opera Festival days in Pesaro in the 1990s, brings a darker, more burnished sound to Ottone. The chest voice still has heft, even if the coloratura passages occasionally show the wear of a long career spent almost exclusively in this most punishing of vocal idioms. Bogdan Mihai’s Adalberto is serviceable, bright up top, a little effortful below the staff.

None of this is quite news. What is worth saying plainly: this opera already exists on disc, and rather well. Opera Rara’s 2005 Edinburgh Festival recording — released the following year, with Majella Cullagh and Manuela Custer in the principal roles — remains a benchmark, not because it is flawless but because it treats the score with the scholarly care Opera Rara brought to Rossini’s more obscure operas before the label’s own fortunes changed. Anyone assembling a comparative history of this piece on record needs to reckon with that set. To call the present issue a “world premiere recording,” as its packaging apparently does, is simply wrong. Video premiere, certainly. Release premiere, no.

Why does the documentation matter, beyond pedantry? Because Adelaide di Borgogna sits at a fascinating hinge point in Rossini’s career — composed in the white heat of his Roman commissions during the Naples years, wedged in among Il Barbiere di Siviglia and La Cenerentola, works that eclipsed it almost instantly and have kept it in shadow ever since. Understanding why Rossini could turn out a comparatively minor opera like this one while simultaneously producing two of the most perfect comedies in the operatic canon tells you something essential about his facility, his working methods, the fluency of a composer who by 1817 had already given the world Tancredi, L’Italiana in Algeri, and Il Turco in Italia — and was not yet twenty-five. A booklet essay that muddles the chronology and conflates this opera’s troubled gestation with Cenerentola’s premiere does listeners no favors.

The conducting is competent, propulsive where it needs to be, though I missed the sense of theatrical danger that the best Rossini performances generate — that feeling that the singers are walking a tightrope and might, at any moment, not make it across. Pratt and Barcellona rarely sound in real jeopardy. That is a compliment to their artistry and faint praise for the interpretation’s dramatic temperature.

Worth having, on balance. The opera is better than its neglect suggests, and there is real pleasure in Barcellona’s lower registers and in the ensemble writing of the finales. But treat the marketing claims with skepticism, and if you already own the Opera Rara set, there is no urgent reason to replace it.