Wolf-ferrari: La Vedova Scaltra (martin)

Anne-Lise Sollied - Soprano, Maurizio Muraro - Bass, Emanuele D’Aguanno - Tenor, Mark Milhofer - Tenor, Teatro La Fenice, Karl Martin - Conductor

La Vedova Scaltra

Recorded live at the Teatro La Fenice, Venice, Italy, 13 and 15 February 2007. World premiere recording on DVD.
Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s La vedrova scaltra…is a genuine discovery – it has never been on DVD before – and a most pleasant surprise. The title of this 1931 work translates as “The Cunning Widow,” and Wolf-Ferrari’s work bears more than a passing resemblance to Franz Lehár’s 1905 operetta The Merry Widow in making its heroine a young widow, Rosaura, who tests potential suitors to find her true love. One of a series of Wolf-Ferrari’s operatic adaptations of the witty farces of Renaissance playwright Carlo Goldoni, La vedrova scaltra features the widow (well sung and acted by Anne-Lise Sollied) disguising herself to meet, in turn, suitors from England, France, Spain and Italy, in order to determine which is the most sincere. There is a serious undercurrent to La vedrova scaltra that is missing in Lehár’s much more famous work, and Wolf-Ferrari’s music amuses without genuinely sparkling – there is nothing in La vedrova scaltra that audiences are likely to be humming after the final curtain. But Wolf-Ferrari gets Goldoni’s tone right, providing a lens of hopefulness and skepticism through which the audience sees the mating dance of the principal characters. And the four suitors, typecast though they certainly are, have some amusing moments as they put forth their countries’ personalities while wooing Rosaura. The staging is expert, the singing very fine, and the conducting nicely balanced and well paced. None of this turns La vedrova scaltra into a major opera, but it is certainly a minor find, worthy of occasional revivals and – in Naxos’ high-quality DVD presentation – very much worth viewing as well as hearing.

Price: $57.98

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