So now, a year on, I thought it would be interesting to see what’s been happening to my rarities since I featured them — what’s been performed, what’s been recorded and what’s been (understandably or not) neglected. Here’s the first part of a two part series. You can read the original piece here.

Vivaldi: Ottone in villa

Vivaldi’s first opera (and such a pretty one) has had just two staged performances in the past year, in August of 2010 at the Innsbruck Festival. This German review has some choice photos of the punk-baroque production, which featured a nice line-up of singers: Veronica Cangemi, Sonia Prina, Sunhae Im. (This opera is all about female voices. There’s a tenor in it, somewhere, who barely gets to open his mouth.) Prina, Cangemi and conductor Giovanni Antonini had also been involved, in May last year, in a concert presentation of Ottone in Krakow, and the same ensemble headed into the Naïve studio, to add this opera to their Vivaldi Edition. The gorgeous Roberta Invernizzi also features, as does young coloratura phenomenon (she’s only 21) Julia Lezhneva, whose disc of Rossini arias I’ve just reviewed for Limelight. Meanwhile, Brilliant Classics last year issued a 2008 recording of Ottone with Tuva Semmingsen in the title role. I easily recommended Richard Hickox’s Chandos recording of the opera a year ago; if I’d had these extra options as my disposal, maybe it wouldn’t have been such a simple choice.

Here’s a clip of that Krakow performance:

Handel: Imeneo

I discovered this opera via a recording of a 1980 BBC broadcast, sent to me by a friend (and Handel aficionado) to feed my Yvonne Kenny addiction. (She sang Rosmene.) I was lucky to be able to recommend something far more recent and, well, commercially available when it came to my article. But since that recording, which was released in 2004, poor Imeneo hasn’t fared too well. I guess audiences (or opera companies) prefer Handel with sorceresses and happy endings; Imeneo has neither. The most recent performance I can find mention of is from 2005, at the now-defunct Opera Ireland. Other than that, the best I can offer is the inclusion of an aria from the opera — Tirinto’s Sorge nell’alma mia — on Handel discs by both Max Emanuel Cencic (2010) and Joyce DiDonato (2008).

But wait! Having written the above, and headed to YouTube for a nice clip of Joyce for you, I discovered that somebody has staged it more recently — there was a student production at McGill University in Quebec in March this year. So here’s a snippet of that instead. (If you still want to hear Joyce, here she is. And if your French is up to it, there’s a review of the McGill production here.)

Mozart: La finta giardiniera

Now here’s a happier tale. No new recordings — in fact none since the one I recommended, which was already a reissue so far from new — but a stack of live performances. According to Operabase, the last twelve months have seen La finta giardiniera performed in Vienna, Madrid and Brussels, and in the next year it will also hit London, Paris (twice), Madrid (again) Warsaw and Bonn, with a roughly 50/50 split between staged productions and concert performances. There some fairly hefty names on board in these shows, too. Sandrine Piau sang (appropriately) Sandrina in Brussels under Jérémie Rhorer, while both Vienna and Madrid had Réné Jacobs at the helm — the former was a David Alden production, the latter a concert, and both had frequent Jacobs collaborators like Alexandrina Pendatchanska, Sunhae Im and Sophie Karthauser in the cast. The same crowd returns to Madrid later this year, while in London, the Barbican will host a concert performance by the Academy of Ancient Music under Richard Egarr, with Rosemary Joshua and Elizabeth Watts (whose Bach disc I recently reviewed) among the cast. Not too bad for an opera written by an 18-year-old!

Since I mentioned her above, here’s Sunhae Im with Sandrina’s aria Geme la tortorella. So pretty…

Meyerbeer: Il crociato in Egitto

Another one which, I must confess, I might never have discovered had I not spent a few years engaged in total Yvonne Kenny completism. She recorded a lot of obscure bel canto for Opera Rara — Offenbach’s Robinson Crusoe is another one you really should hear, and I’d have recommended it were the only recording not completely out of print — but I think Il crociato is the more tuneful. I gave up early on on comprehending the plot: any opera whose main characters all have names beginning with ‘A’ is just asking for trouble. The music however, is terribly enjoyable, if you like that sort of thing. All of which probably explains why it hasn’t been staged since 2007, when La Fenice put it on, with Patrizia Ciofi in Yvonne’s role and male soprano Michael Maniaci as the hero. The production was recorded for CD and DVD. The CD recording, having been released by Naxos, is certainly a much less pricey option than Opera Rara’s. I did recommend the latter in my article but frankly, if you don’t mind the footsteps and applause that come with a live recording, the Naxos is probably a more sensible choice!

A clip from the La Fenice production:

Bizet: Djamileh

Oh, Djamileh. I wish I had better news. There were a few productions in the middle of the last decade — Leeds in 2004, Haslemere in 2006, Lyon in 2006, Pittsburgh in 2008 — but nothing more recent that I can see, and I can’t find it on anyone’s schedule either. There are a couple of clips from slightly more recent amateur productions on YouTube, which I’ll leave to find for yourselves if you really want to. Meanwhile, Franco Bonisolli and Lucia Popp remain the only genuine offer. I’m not complaining; they’d probably be unbeaten even if the opera were ten times more popular. Have a listen:

This brings us to a halfway point and a convenient stopping place — I don’t want to overload you any more than I already have. I’ll be back with the other five next week. And if there any recent performances or recordings of the above that I’ve missed, do let me know! I love to hear of my pet operas doing well in the big wide world.

Sarah presents her round-up of the past year’s must-have opera recordings in Limelight‘s July Opera Issue, on sale now