Search - Vincenzo Bellini, Franco Piva, Nina Batatunashvili :: Bellini: Fragments from Ernani

One Quarter of an Opera Semi-Realized

James S. Eisenberg | 11/08/2007

(2 out of 5 stars)

"Around 1830 Bellini and his favored librettist Romani began writing an opera based on Victor Hugo's ERNANI. The title character in Bellini's work was to be a travesty soprano role written for the great Giuditta Pasta. Clearly this was going to be a very different view of Ernani than the opera of Verdi written some fourteen years later. Possibly because of anticipated censorship problems, the composer abandoned the project after sketching about a quarter of the work. The sketches were almost entirely of vocal lines with only a handful of instrumental indications. This means that if you intend to perform the score as it stands, you have long passages of unaccompanied singing. That is exactly what is done here. The result will probably be irresistible for Bellini lovers, but is also frustrating in the extreme. There should have been an attempt to realize the orchestral parts.

The singing is extremely rough. A typical example of what is going on in Italy these days, and the news is NOT good.

More appealing (and better sung) is the filler, a trio from an early Bellini cantata.

At Forty-four minutes this disc is NOT a bargain."