Interview, Daniele Rustioni on Bellini's Adelson e Salvini

Opera Rara certainly have form when it comes to flying the flag for Bellini's little-known early works: with David Parry at the helm, they made an impressive case for his fourth opera La straniera back in 2008, and followed it with a much-praised account of its predecessor Il pirata (written for La Scala in 1827) four years later. For their latest recording (released tomorrow), they've gone right back to the very beginning with a compelling reading of Bellini's first-ever attempt at a full-scale opera, Adelson e Salvini; written whilst he was still a pupil at the Naples Conservatory and juxtaposing opera buffa elements with high melodrama, this ‘opera semi-seria’ illustrates just how much the young composer was in thrall to Rossini, as well as offering some tantalising foretastes of his own mature style.

Making his first appearance on the label is the dynamic young Italian conductor Daniele Rustioni, who’s set to make his Metropolitan Opera debut with Aida later this month. I met up with him a couple of weeks ago, when he was in London to conduct La traviata at the Royal Opera House (his direction was praised as 'wonderfully vital' by The Guardian and 'crisply propulsive' by The Telegraph) and to launch the new recording of Adelson at Opera Rara HQ in Shoreditch…

Adelson e Salvini was hugely popular immediately after its premiere - why do you think it fell off the radar so suddenly?

First of all, it’s a conservatoire piece, written to show off Bellini’s skills at the end of his studies. It’s also shaped in a very strange way – a bit like an Italian singspiel, what with all the spoken dialogue. It also has this comic character, Bonifacio, who speaks in the Neapolitan dialect: Maurizio Muraro (who sang it for us) is Italian, but to prepare for this role he basically had to learn a new language! We decided that the character should stay Neapolitan for the recording rather than change dialect as would have been the case if the opera was toured - if it was performed in the north of Italy, for example, Bonifacio would have had an accent from somewhere like Bergamo and the text would actually have been altered.

Bellini did have immediate success with this opera, and straight after its first outing he was commissioned to write a piece for the Teatro San Carlo, Bianca e Fernando, for which he used some of the music from Adelson e Salvini. Later on, he also recycled the most famous aria (‘Dopo l’oscura nembo’) for Giulietta’s romance ‘O quante volte’ in I Capuleti e I Montecchi, and other passages also found their way into Il pirata and La straniera.

And to be honest, the story is a bit strange as well! It was a great pleasure in fact to do this new version, because the opera was originally performed in two acts with a completely different dramatic ending. For this recording for Opera Rara, we have three acts, and the story takes a different turn in the Act Two finale. We also have a completely new third act, featuring what I think is the real jewel of this recording: Salvini’s aria ‘Si cadro... ma estinto ancora’, with obbligato cor anglais. This is a real discovery, because it’s even more beautiful than Nelly’s aria (which crops up on numerous recital-discs) – it has this kind of melancholia which is typical of Bellini, and I think it’s fascinating because when you think about Bellini you think of ‘Casta diva’, and you can find the genesis of ‘Casta diva’ in this aria, particularly in the accompaniment and structure.

Now I’m very flattered by all the comments in reviews about the rhythmical energy of the performance, because a lot of this score is really more Rossinian than Bellinian - but in certain places we can already find the Bellini of I Puritani, his final opera. It’s all about finding the interpretative key, and what was fascinating about making the recording and doing the live performance was the discovery that no tempo-changes were written in the score, so we had to make up many of our own! In order to make the phrasing work, we had to change the tempo every time the mood of the music changed. And this is one of the most difficult things about conducting bel canto repertoire: you have to put in so much subjective interpretative force, whereas in twentieth-century music these things are already written, so if you take an objective point of view as an interpreter and follow what is written, everything works! I’m not sure why this shift took place – maybe there were too many bad conductors around! – but at some point, composers seem to have decided ‘Enough is enough’ and started to spell out almost everything they wanted. Puccini, for example, notated everything, even the stage directions!

With bel canto repertoire, on the other hand, you need to somehow fill out the superficial emptiness of the page, including gearing all the dynamics towards the vocal lines, so it’s a completely different interpretation of the same aria each time you have a different singer taking on the same role!

Do you think Bellini’s musical imagination here was in any way limited by the constraints of writing for an academic institution?

No, absolutely not. Of course the closed numbers and the structure were all bound by operatic convention, so there’s nothing extraordinary or new about that, but at the same time, it’s completely crazy with all the dialogue: this constant switching between singing and speech gives the performance such a different energy. It’s like performing an operetta by Johann Strauss, but 60 years earlier! Though of course we’re talking about a completely different kind of vocal difficulty from what Strauss presents singers, or, for example, Mozart in Die Zauberflöte.

Bellini was writing for student singers (and most likely voices which he would’ve known well) – how much is that reflected in the vocal lines, and how much did you embellish what’s there in order to showcase the very experienced cast you had for this recording?

Well, I have to say there are already some pretty difficult bits in this opera! In the Act One finale, for instance, Nelly has to sing very fast semiquavers, and I would’ve taken the tempo much faster if it weren’t for the fact that it would become impossible to keep this up later on. But we wanted at least to perform all the notes that Bellini had written, and when it became unclear what those notes were, then we could play around! We can adapt, that’s the real message I want to relay: we can adapt and compose ourselves a bit in this kind of repertoire, and that’s fascinating. All the ornamentation for the repetitions were written by me and my assistant, for example, as were many of the cadenzas at the end of the duets.

All of the female roles in the work were originally taken by boy singers – how much did you adapt their music for the three mezzos who appear on the recording?

I admit that we did take the liberty of changing some small portions of the vocal line, especially for Fanny and Madama Rivers. This wasn’t because of the singers, but in order to attain a cleaner sound and to add more excitement through having higher vocal lines. But having said that, there are three different versions of Nelly’s famous aria (one in D, one in E and one in F) and we didn’t record the one in F because it’s really for soprano and it has these impossible very high cadenzas which were actually written by Bellini!

You mentioned the Rossinian elements in the score earlier on – how much had Bellini been exposed to his music, and what was his attitude towards it?

Oh, he was obsessed! Adelson e Salvini was written around the time of Semiramide, which he saw when it was performed at the Teatro San Carlo. He was completely bowled over by it and must have typically rushed to his composition teacher saying something like, “Maestro, Maestro, GOD WAS HERE!!!”, with the teacher replying, “Yes, yes, whatever. You should try to do better.” Of course, it was this teacher in Naples who encouraged him to find his own path and his own voice. He made Bellini study all the old Neapolitan composers (people like Paisiello and Cimarosa) and pushed him to find a way to deliver his own beautiful melodies. From what I’ve read, Rossini was criticised at the time because his melodies were not considered immortal! His music is immortal in my opinion – the way he treats the voice, the coloratura fireworks - but even in Rossini’s serious operas (for instance Guillaume Tell’s aria with solo cello), he never approaches the level that Bellini eventually attained thanks to this constant pressure from his teacher to focus on the beauty and the line of the melody. I think a lot of what we hear in Adelson e Salvini - all these Rossinian rhythms and use of repeated notes to create atmospheres of anxiety or excitement - was abandoned later on by Bellini. However, it’s very fascinating to see how he treated these Rossinian elements in Adelson e Salvini, and we certainly tried to deliver this balance between the Rossinian and Bellinian elements in this recording. I also feel that in the Act Two finale there are places which even sound closer to Verdi than to Rossini.

You’re conducting a lot of later Italian opera at the moment (La traviata at Covent Garden and Aida at The Met) – how does that compare with working on bel canto repertoire, and how were you first exposed to it?

I was lucky enough to sing in the boys’ choir at La Scala, and I heard some very good singers there from whom I learned a lot about training the voice. After my voice broke, I continued to sing in some choirs including the Verdi Choir in Milan and in some churches. I also trained as a pianist, so I was always working with voices. I then went onto work at the Accademia Teatro alla Scala as a repetiteur, the Royal Academy of Music’s vocal department, the National Opera Studio, and finally at the Jette Parker Young Artists Programme at the Royal Opera House. Working with young artists on a daily basis means you focus mainly on music from Handel to Bellini, because it’s not like they’re going to rock up singing Wotan!

The first operas I conducted were Cavalleria rusticana & Pagliacci, and La bohème. After conducting such works at a young age you end up thinking, “Oh, I’m amazing, I’m a genius!”, but then when you try your first L'elisir d'amore and it’s a complete mess, then you realise that actually bel canto is the most difficult repertoire to conduct!

I also think that many great maestros turn down offers to do bel canto because more often than not the focus is on the singers, and even if you do a fantastic job (i.e. you keep everything together and balanced tempo-wise, and you communicate properly with the singers), only maybe a critic might comment at the end of their review, “In the pit, all was present and correct.” Critics might also complain that the tempi was sluggish, or you pushed the singers too much... it’s a complete nightmare! Also during the rehearsals, you’re really in charge of creating something from the score, composing almost! I want to do more bel canto but I always strive to find a balance in terms of the type of repertoire I conduct as there’s the danger of being branded ‘the bel canto maestro.’ I also have my orchestra in Florence and I always conduct one symphonic programme a month. By gaining more and more experience conducting symphonic repertoire, you are also able to do more with the orchestra when you’re back in the pit conducting opera.

Other early Bellini operas on Opera Rara