Twenty-five years separate the action in the prologue and first act of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra, and very nearly the same stretch of time elapsed between the opera’s first incarnation – whose opening night in 1857 the composer wrote off, a touch unjustly, as a “fiasco” – and its revised second version, premiered in 1881. The latter has more or less kept a foothold in the standard repertory ever since; but it’s the 1857 original, which Opera Rara, those tireless travellers of opera’s byways and branch lines, have polished up in a brand new edition for a studio recording and this concert performance at Bridgewater Hall.
Contours of plot and libretto remain largely intact. The famous Council Chamber scene is the most keenly felt absence – the town square confrontation, which instead concludes Act II, has plenty of personal drama but far less of its replacement’s febrile patriotic charge – and a smaller role for Paolo Albiani means his treacherous machinations lose their Iago-like bite. But the most palpable difference is in the music itself: starker and more declamatory for both orchestra and singers, without the lyrical sweep and splashes of colour that would enliven the 1881 revision.
