Belle Cao

VOICEBOX:Opera in Concert opened their 50th anniversary season at the Jane Mallett Theatre with the first of three Verdi rarities.  Un giorno di regno was Verdi’s second opera and it premiered at La Scala in 1840 to no great acclaim.  It’s a curiously old fashioned piece for its time.  Perhaps the fact that it sets a libretto written over twenty years earlier accounts for some of that.  It’s very much a bel canto work.  It’s sort of a comedy though it’s not actually all that funny; being largely concerned with machinations about who marries whom played around a somewhat implausible impersonation of the King of Poland by a minor French aristocrat.  It’s no sillier than many Donizetti operas but perhaps by 1840 that formula was wearing rather thin. Continue reading →