Alzira – review

The Chelsea Opera Group's Verdi bicentenary tribute was a concert performance of Alzira, among the least frequently heard and most severely criticised of his operas.

Dating from 1845, and based, unusually for Verdi, on Voltaire, it's set during the Spanish conquest of Peru and contrasts colonial proprietorialism with ideas of "noble savagery" in its depiction of the conquistador Gusmano and the native warrior Zamoro, both in love with the Inca princess Alzira.

The opera is no masterpiece, but disparagement of the score as uninspired has never seemed justified on the rare occasions we hear it. The music has the clamorous, unruly vitality of early Verdi at his best, though you could argue the religiose finale sits uneasily with the rest of it. Once dismissed as too short, it now strikes us as admirably compact. The Spanish-imperial subject invites inevitable – and unfair – comparisons with Don Carlos, though dramatically we are closer to Un Ballo in Maschera. The shimmering strings and sensual warmth of Alzira's own music, meanwhile, looks forward to Verdi's depiction of Amelia Grimaldi in Simon Boccanegra more than a decade later.

It doesn't require undue subtlety in performance, either, and the COG admirably placed the emphasis on raw emotion and vocal thrills.

Majella Cullagh, all filigree coloratura and electrifying high notes, was the put-upon heroine torn between two contrasting bundles of testosterone in the shape of Mario Sofroniou's clarion Zamoro and Mark Holland's brutally insistent Gusmano. The choral singing was strong, and conductor Gianluca Marcianò did wonders with the punchy exoticism of the orchestration. The performance was dedicated to Colin Davis, COG's first conductor, and preceded by the overture to Mozart's Don Giovanni, played in his memory.