Lo speziale

I cannot agree with the ungenerous and uninformed review of the first reviewer of this production. For a start, no one pretends that Haydn was a patch on Mozart as an opera composer, so the comparisons are pointless. As for the "sameness" of the music, I think that much is to be blamed on the lack of subtitles. On that particular point I absolutely concur. There is a lot of wit, humour as well as elegant tunes in this work. And - I agree - it is hard to know what the characters are singing without even a synopsis on the box cover.

Luckily I had my Groves Dictionary of Opera, and was able not only to have the usual detailed storyline, but also an outline of all the musical numbers, with plenty of pointers as to what to look out for in the arias etc. I would advise anyone who wishes to view this opera to find a synopsis of some kind - for example in Sempronio's first aria - vocal leaps and dips actually musically describe his geographical/travel interests. Then there is an aria for the young hero Mengone which is about laxatives to put off his rival Volpone (the trouser role for mezzo), and so on.

So what i am saying is that I am absolutely grateful that there is any production available at all to buy of a Haydn opera. I have 11 DVD versions of Mozart's Don Giovanni and there are many more to buy - but how many DVD versions of any Haydn opera? Haydn was not the dramatist that Mozart was, and his many operas are I am sure very formulaic, but so were Paisiello's and other lesser operatic baroque-to-classical composers of the time (Salieri's operas - I have three of them - are for example not musically exciting).None of them was like Gluck before Mozart and no one was immediately after Mozart (think of the great German and Austrian composers immediately following - Beethoven wrote one opera, Schumann and Schubert did not become famous for their stage works, although it was Schubert's great ambition.

It was also very interesting that this opera has two tenors - the older character played by Luigi Alva, famous in the middle of the last century for his Ottavio (Don Giovanni) and Count Almaviva (Barber of Seville) and similar roles. So it was delightful to see/hear him late in his career, maybe less mellifluous of tone, but still delightful.

The real treat is to see and hear the young William Mateuzzi (so slim at the time of the recording!) with his flexible light tenor, and discover his comic flair (his many Rossini assumptions on CD are not generally cheerful).

Please, if you appreciate the rare and live on an island as I do where there is no opera house, unless you get on a plane, and if you don't require top-grade production values for everything you watch, this is for you.