Belisario, Opera Rara, Barbican Hall / Edgar, New Sussex Opera, Town Hall, Lewes, review

Belisario: * * * * *

Edgar: * * * *

Two seldom heard works emerged in concert performances last week: how fortunate we are in hard economic times that such risky enterprises are still undertaken.

Donizetti’s Belisario proved a revelation. Written just before Lucia di Lammermoor (and containing a similar sextet), it’s a muscular, martial melodrama about a Byzantine general whose honour is besmirched by a scheming wife.

It ends badly for everyone, but not before Donizetti has lavished some enthralling music on the strongly drawn characters – the climax being a magnificent duet for father and daughter which must have impressed the young Verdi, a greenhorn at the time of Belisario’s première in 1836.

Like Riccardo Muti, Mark Elder insists on taking this sort of music seriously, in conducting it with a respect and rigour which dignifies even its superficially trite episodes without diminishing their visceral immediacy.

The BBC Symphony Orchestra played flawlessly for him.

In the title role, Nicola Alaimo presented an impressive old-school Italian baritone, forthright in style and big in vocal and physical presence. The fluently musical young American tenor Russell Thomas was nothing short of sensational as Belisario’s lost son, while Joyce El Khoury (WNO’s Violetta earlier this year) brought fluent coloratura and viperish intensity to the insidious music for Belisario’s vengeful wife.

With strong support from Alastair Miles, Peter Hoare and Camilla Roberts, as well as powerful interjections from the BBC Singers, Donizetti’s high stature as a musical dramatist was vindicated. It’s good news that the co-producer Opera Rara is taking this team into the recording studio, but Belisario merits a fully staged production too.

The first British performance of Puccini’s second opera Edgar in its original four-act version proved almost as rewarding.

The plot (based on the Carmen-Tannhäuser dichotomy between pure love and corrupt sex) could scarcely be sillier, the characters are weakly drawn and Puccini’s repeated subsequent revisions show that he knew that the score needed cutting. But there’s so much sumptuous, palpitating music on offer that nobody is going to complain, and it’s fascinating to hear pre-echoes of so much that was to come in Manon Lescaut, Tosca and Madama Butterfly.

New Sussex Opera’s pro-am performance may be rough round the edges, but it glows with enthusiasm, lovingly conducted by Nicholas Jenkins. John Hudson sings robustly as the hapless Edgar, and Mary Plazas and Gweneth Ann Jeffers are gloriously full-blooded as the angelic and diabolical female parties.

Utter bliss of a slightly dirty kind.

Edgar is at King’s Theatre, Southsea (023 9282 8282), 4 November; and Winter Garden, Eastbourne (01323 412000), 11 November