L’aio nell’imbarazzo (A tutor in a jam) is a Donizetti comedy that was popular in its day; both in its original version and revised as Don Gregorio.  It’s now received a new scholarly edition that attempts to get back as far as possible to the original.  That edition was used for a production directed by Francesco Micheli at the Teatro Donizetti in Bergamo in 2022 and filmed for video release.

It’s a not untypical Donizetti comedy.  The plot is pretty silly and the music is formulaic but not without its moments.  To summarize; Don Giulio has hired a tutor, Don Gregorio, to look after his two sons; one of whom is twenty-five and the other younger and a bit thick.  They aren’t allowed out of the house or to meet women.  Despite this, the elder, Enrico, has secretly married one of the neighbours, Gilda, daughter of a recently deceased colonel.  They have a son.  Enrico shares his secret with Don Gregorio who agrees to help.  This results in the elderly servant Leonarda (who is in love with the younger son Pippetto) seeing Gilda coming and going.  She assumes Don Gregorio has a mistress and decides to rat him out to Don Giulio.  Thus Don Giulio finds out what has happened and threatens to throw Gilda and Enrico on to the street.  But Gilda is tougher than she looks and talks Don Giulio round.  The marriage is now official, Leonarda is banished and Pippetto is sent on a trip around the world.

For some reason Micheli thinks this can be turned into some sort of allegory about social media, AI and so on so he sets it in 2042.  Don Giulio is an ambitious conservative politician.  Leonarda and the boys are acolytes in Gregorio’s PR/digital media business (though he’s still trying to teach them Latin grammar and Cicero).  Everybody dresses like cartoon characters. Social media logos, newspaper headlines, slogans, surveillance cameras, Amazon boxes and food delivery drivers abound.  Everyone seems to be wearing VR glasses.  A man and woman appear with Don Giulio from time to time (avatars of his younger self and his ex wife?) and Gilda ends up as President of the Republic.  It’s incredibly visually busy with characters moving all over on scenery trucks and wheeled chairs.  I’m just not sure there’s enough substance in the work to carry all the freight.

The performances are pretty good though.  There’s Alessandro Corbelli as Don Giulio and Alex Esposito as Don Gregorio which is about as good as you can get for Italian comedy.  Marilena Ruta as Gilda is very good indeed.  She’s a fine actress with a very pure and agile soprano heard to best effect in her arias just before the finale.  Francesco Lucii, as Enrico, has excellent high notes and sounds like a proper Donizetti tenor and Lorenzo Martelli hams it up as best he can as the ridiculous Pippetto.  Conductor Vincenzo Milletarì generally takes things at a pretty brisk pace which is probably the only way to deal with the innumerable patter numbers.  He gets good support from the house chorus and orchestra.

Matteo Richietti does a good job with the video.  There’s so much going on that it’s a minor miracle that one sees as much of it as one does.  Video directors of an earlier generation would likely have cut 90% of what the theatre audiences saw.  Sound (surround and stereo) and video quality on Blu-ray are very good indeed.  There are no extras but there’s a decent interview with the conductor in the booklet.  It maybe focusses too much on the changes brought about by the new edition but it does give some insight into the production.  There’s also a synopsis and track listing.  Subtitle options are Italian, English, French, German, Korean and Japanese.

I guess one has to say that this is a pretty bold effort to make something out of a rather slight opera but I’m not sure it really succeeds.  One for the Donizetti completists perhaps?

Catalogue information: Dynamic Blu-ray DYN 57993