Linda di Chamounix
Royal Opera
Così fan tutte
Opera North
Four years ago the Royal Opera opened its season with concert performances of Donizetti’s Dom Sébastien, which came as a near-revelation to many of us, and subsequently appeared on Opera Rara. This year it opened with the scarcely better-known Linda di Chamounix, which was no revelation at all. In both cases Mark Elder conducted, and manifested his passionate devotion to the scores. While Dom Sébastien is a serious work, Linda is a melodramma semiserio, which means not only that it ends happily, but also that it conjoins, sometimes disconcertingly, serious and comic elements: not like Don Giovanni, say, but in a more clumsy way. Its general level of invention seems to me much weaker, too, than at least half a dozen Donizetti operas I can think of, and I am baffled by Elder’s devotion to it.
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