Verdi: Simon Boccanegra (1857 version). Eri Nakamura, Iván Ayón-Rivas, Germán Enrique Alcántara, William Thomas, Sergio Vitale. The Hallé, Chorus of Opera North. Mark Elder, conductor. Opera Rara ORC65. Total time: 133 minutes.
DIGITAL REVIEW — Verdi’s best-known operas are mostly from the years 1851-53 (Rigoletto, Il trovatore, and La traviata) and from his last creative period: 1871-93 (Aida, Otello, and Falstaff). But the ones from the 1850s and 1860s often seem somewhat puzzling, as if they are trying to negotiate a middle path between the clear-cut traditional structures Verdi had inherited from Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini — complete with moments of high lyricism, self-enclosed “movements” within arias and duets, and extensive flights of coloratura, especially for the soprano — and the more fluid and conversational exchanges typical of his last operas. These exchanges feel more conversational in large part because they are set more syllabically, with the main musical continuity being entrusted to the orchestra, much as Wagner was doing at the same time in works such as Tannhäuser and Lohengrin.
The operas from this, as we might call it, “late middle period” for Verdi (1855-67) include Les Vêpres siciliennes, Simon Boccanegra, Un ballo in maschera, La forza del destino, and Don Carlos. All of these do get performed, of course (the two French ones often in Italian translation), and demonstrate a composer trying, with much success, to expand his musicodramatic palette.
But one of them, Simon Boccanegra, though performed more often in recent decades than before, has been particularly hard for opera aficionados to place in its context, because what nearly always gets recorded is the version that Verdi made 24 years later for a revival in 1881. Not surprisingly, the revised version of Boccanegra bears signs of having come from two different eras in Verdi’s development, as is true also for Macbeth (1847), which he revised in 1865. This is not necessarily a bad thing: The 1881 version fascinates with its diversity of stylistic and structural means as much as it does with the characterizations and dramatic episodes that are so cherishable in nearly any Verdi opera.
But the 1857 version of Simon Boccanegra has its own integrity and coherence, as is now apparent in its first studio recording under the alert baton of Mark Elder, music director of English National Opera from 1979 to 1993, and of The Hallé — the current name of the longstanding Hallé Orchestra — from 2000 to 2024.
What struck me most is how lively the work is in this version. Verdi scholars often emphasize its grimness (for example, the title character gets no extended aria), as if this explains why it eventually stopped getting performed until the composer revised, improved, and relaunched it decades later.
But the revised version is even grimmer, indeed more consistently so. By contrast, the 1857 one turns out to be dotted with colorful, bouncy passages, recalling moments in, say, La traviata. Among the highlights that would be excised in 1881 are an immensely attractive prelude that lets us hear four tunes from the opera to come; a highly conventional, but enormously effective, cabaletta for Amelia in the Act 1 aria in which she awaits a visit from her beloved Gabriele Adorno; and a similarly spiffy cabaletta for Amelia and Gabriele to end their immediately subsequent duet.
The list of passages that were excised or reworked is so extensive that the otherwise informative essays in the thick booklet only mention a few, and the full comparison in Julian Budden’s three-volume The Operas of Verdi becomes harder to follow than any other in that immensely insightful study. The problem, of course, is that the distance is vast between the work’s original manner and that of the aging yet still vital composer who would, in three years, be working on Otello. But all commentators agree that the single biggest difference was the excising of the Act 1 finale, with its celebratory chorus and ballet, and the introduction instead of the Chamber Council scene, which beefs up the role of the Doge Simon and reaches an immensely powerful climax with Simon’s (perhaps idealistic, and certainly not historical) call for peace between the feuding Guelphs and Ghibellines and his demand that all present join in cursing whoever had abducted Amelia (his daughter, who had, unknown to him, been raised by his sworn enemy Fiesco).
In this recording, we get to hear, in the critical edition carefully prepared by Verdi authority Roger Parker, that original Act 1 finale, complete with its short but vivid ballet (with chorus), which turns out to be a precursor to the Triumphal Scene in Aida (1871), in that it involves emphatic displays of ferocity by some of Venice’s proud soldiers and graceful dancing by women captives from the unspecified lands that the Doge’s troops have recently conquered in war. We can assume that these lands are in North Africa, just across the Mediterranean, not least because Verdi quotes, repeatedly, a highly characteristic rising passage in the strings from Félicien David’s much-performed secular oratorio Le désert, a work set in the Arab world, not in sub-Saharan Africa. (David termed the work an ode-symphonie because it contained a spoken narration in verse. It has been recorded twice now: see my review at OperaToday.com.)
We already knew that Verdi was inspired by Le désert in three other works: the sunrises in Alzira (1845) and Attila (1846) and when devout Muslims enter the stage for an “invocation of Allah” in the ballet music Verdi wrote in 1894 for the Paris production of Otello. Oddly, this blatant and highly purposeful borrowing from the David work, given as if in quotation marks, has rarely if ever been mentioned by Verdi scholars, and I’m happy to announce it here. (If you want to hear the passage in Le désert, it’s in the choral movement in part 2 — the work’s “nighttime” section — and entitled “La liberté au désert.”)
Elder keeps The Hallé performing with tight ensemble and consistently beautiful tone and sets tempos that always sound natural and convincing. His vocal soloists are all apt for their roles, the best of them by a good margin being the superb young Peruvian tenor Iván Ayón-Rivas, who has mastered not just the basics of operatic tenorizing but the refinements as well, including subtle gradations of loud-to-soft (or the reverse) on single short notes. And all while conveying the text vividly and meaningfully.
The other singers maintain high competence, though not always with such total mastery. Eri Nakamura, as Amelia, creates a credible character, and her high notes are splendid, whether soft or loud; but she sometimes lacks finesse on short notes, not landing squarely on pitch or with solid breath. English bass William Thomas is capable as the Genoese nobleman Fiesco, but his low notes are pale. The Italian baritone Sergio Vitale brings a solid sound and a welcome clarity of diction to the important secondary role of the goldsmith Paolo. I look forward to hearing him in a bigger assignment. As for the title role, Argentine baritone Germán Enrique Alcántara wins our concern and affection through his solid tone production and vivid rendering of the text — without, almost inevitably, effacing memories of Tito Gobbi or other great baritones who have made this part their own in recordings of the 1881 reworking.
There have been two previous recordings of the 1857 version (BBC 1975, conducted by John Matheson; Teatro la Fenice 1999, conducted by Renato Palumbo), but neither was made under careful studio conditions, and neither had access to Parker’s critical edition (completed and made available by Ricordi in 2021). Now that we can hear the work Verdi first imagined, published (in piano-vocal score), and brought to performance, we can welcome the opera as the coherent and well-thought-out work it always was and learn to love it for itself and not as a pale shadow of the 1881 revised version.
