It’s been a busy operatic week, with a nearly great concert performance of Parsifal in Birmingham on Sunday (reviewed by Anna Picard in last week’s Spectator), Carmen at the Coliseum on Wednesday, Donizetti’s Poliuto at Glyndebourne on Thursday and Carmen, also at Glyndebourne, on Saturday. A trajectory that Nietzsche would have approved of, moving from brooding northern transfiguration to sunlit, brilliant southern violence and destruction.
Poliuto is mostly known, if at all, in the live recording made at La Scala in 1960 as a vehicle for Callas’s return, in a role that made comparatively small demands on her, and much larger ones on Franco Corelli and Ettore Bastianini. That recording reveals the work to be mainly run-of-the-mill, requiring and, up to a point, rewarding artists of that stature. Donizetti made a French version of the piece, called Les Martyrs, which is coming in for a good deal of respectful critical attention at present, thanks to Opera Rara’s performance of it at the Royal Festival Hall last year and its recent release on three long CDs.
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