Stephen Langridge’s production of Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux recorded at the Donizetti Festival in Bergamo in 2024 is heavy on death symbolism.  The general look of the sets is fairly abstract with a sort of light box with a gallery and a few bright red elements; the throne, the Nottinghams’ bed and so on, but there are skulls and other memento mori everywhere.  Costuming is sort of operatic Tudor but Elisabetta’s dress is a print that includes skulls and she’s doubled by a human size, identically dressed, Death puppet.  As seems to be the fashion, much of the time only the front of the stage is lit leaving characters lurking in the gloom upstage.

Visuals aside though the story telling is pretty straightforward and the success or otherwise rests on the singing and acting which is really good.  Jessica Pratt, as Elisabetta, sings in the proper bel canto style and has excellent high notes.  She also does a very good job of making the insecure and vengeful cougar queen credible.  John Osborn is equally good, also singing stylishly, and with really bell like high notes.  He’s quite emotionally convincing too.  The Nottinghams are done nicely too with Simone Plazolla passionate with excellent legato and great dignity.  Raffaella Lupinacci’s Sara is very stouching.  It’s hard not to feel sympathy for the one character who finds herself trapped in a situation absolutely not of her own making.  She has a very pleasing, quite dark, mezzo too.

Riccardo Frizza takes things at a pretty fair clip and gets lots of drama out of the festival orchestra backed up by some excellent work by the chorus (Coro dell’Accademia Teatro alla Scala).  This s one of the most, perhaps the most, dramatic of Donizetti’s many operas and he makes the most of it.

Matteo Ricchetti’s video direction is straightforward and effective backed up by an excellent Blu-ray picture.  The sound is also good (PCM stereo and DTS-HD-MA).  The booklet has a useful three way conversation between Alberto Matteoli, Frizza and Langridge (TL:DR it’s not history folks!) plus the usual synopsis and track listing.

There aren’t a lot of Blu-ray recordings of Roberto Devereux available and this definitely has the starriest cast of those that are available.  The production and performance serve the work well and the technical values are high.

Catalogue information: Dynamic Blu-ray DYN 58076 (due for release August 15th 2025)