Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Cherubini: Lodoiska

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

In his works for the opera houses of Paris, Luigi Cherubini (1760-1842) built upon the "reformed" classical style of opera established by his predecessor there, Christoph Willibald Gluck. Cherubini's lyric tragedy Medea (1797), heard on this program in LP format long ago on Sunday, February 3, 1985, is a masterpiece of dramatic concentration in an austere symphonic musical framework.

Brilliantly successful in its own day was his Lodoiska (1791), a French opéra comique with spoken word dialog and sung numbers almost as intense as Medea. Lodioiska is actually a heroic "rescue opera," one of the forerunners of Beethoven's Fidelio. In time this revolutionary pièce de sauvetage fell out of the repertoire, but it forever changed the course of French operatic history. Nineteenth century composers like Rossini and Spontini were greatly indebted to it. Lodoiska was revived for the first time in the twentieth century at Milan's Teatro alla Scala in 1951 in Italian language translation and with a badly adapted musical score.

When it was next staged there in 1991, conductor Riccardo Muti drew upon a new score based on the two oldest and most reliable printed editions. Lodoiska was recorded at La Scala live in performance in February, 1991 for release stateside on two Sony Classical CD's. Muti leads the La Scala chorus and orchestra, with a cast of vocal notables including tenor Alessandro Corbelli. The opera is sung in French, employing the original libretto. I have aired Lodoiska twice before, first on May 3, 1992 and then on Sunday, February 26, 2006. I make use of the same Sony CD release a third time today.