ProStudioMasters.com

“[It's with] the knowledge that in enabling such a venture, Opera Rara is not only going to bring pleasure to connoisseurs... but is also adding to the sum of musical knowledge and producing for posterity a recording of a work very few would otherwise get to hear.” - The Financial Times When Patric Schmid and Don White conceived Opera Rara in the late 1960s, their dream was to establish a Donizetti collection that would document all his operas through recordings. With nearly 70 operas to his name, this was no small ambition, particularly as at that time only a handful of Donizetti operas were widely known. On Wednesday 18 July 2018, Opera Rara – in their fourth collaboration with the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden – presented the world première of Donizetti’s L’Ange de Nisida. Opera Rara’s Artistic Director Sir Mark Elder conducted two concert performances at Covent Garden, during which this live recording was made. The recording marks the company’s 25th complete opera recording by the composer and Sir Mark Elder’s ninth Donizetti title for Opera Rara. L’Ange de Nisida was due to be among Donizetti’s first operas to be premièred in Paris after the composer’s move to the French capital in 1838. The project had to be abandoned, though, when the commissioning theatre, the Théâtre de la Renaissance, went bankrupt. Although Donizetti would later use portions of its score in La Favorite, which premièred at the Opéra, L’Ange de Nisida was long deemed too fragmentary to be capable of reconstruction. However, discoveries in the Paris archives by the Italian scholar Candida Mantica in 2009 changed opinions and, over the last 10 years, the 800-page score has been restored.