Bellini Il Pirata Javier Camarena, Marina Rebeka, Franco Vassallo, Antonio Di Matteo, Gustavo De Gennaro, Sonia Fortunato; Chorus and Orchestra of Teatro Massimo Bellini, Catania/Fabrizio Maria Carminati Prima Classics PRIMA010 160:51 mins (3 discs)
Rossini still hovers in the wings of Bellini’s remarkably accomplished third opera. The overture has that all-too-familiar Rossini-style crescendo, while the vocal writing for Gualtiero, the eponymous Pirate of the title, hints at the older composer’s florid style.
However, Felice Romani’s preposterous libretto with pirates and a wronged woman, Imogene, struggling against a baritone tyrant has definitely stepped into the Romantic era, and Bellini’s long-limbed melodies, relished in this admirable production, are like nothing that had come before.
The role of Imogene has always appealed to lyric sopranos with a flair for drama – notably, Maria Callas and then Montserrat Caballé; and while Marina Rebeka may not be their equal, her Act I Cavatina ‘Lo sognai ferito’ displays a nimble coloratura from a voice that sits happily in the middle register but with a nice ripe top. She loses her mind very beautifully at the end of the opera.
Imogene’s would-be lover Gualtiero, played by the Mexican Javier Camarena, is every inch the tortured Romantic hero and Imogene’s equal in their Act II duet ‘Vieni i cerchiam pe’mari’, which ought to bring the house down in any half way good production.
A word of praise, too, for the villainous baritone Ernesto. Franco Vassallo eschews eye-rolling melodrama in search of a character who is genuinely divided against himself in his aria ‘Tu m’apristi in cor ferita’. Fabrizio Maria Carminati may have grown up in Milan but conducting the Orchestra and Chorus of the Teatro Massimo Bellini di Catania he is unmistakeably a Sicilian in the Bellini mould!
Christopher Cook