Teatro Nuovo is in some respects like the Baroque and other Early Music enterprises that have enriched our musical and operatic scene since the revival of interest in those repertoires following WW2, in that it seeks to enliven its chosen repertoire through a close examination of period performance practice, including the use of period instruments and the study of then-prevailing vocal techniques, stylistic conventions, and the orchestra-to-stage relationship. And Italian Romantic opera gives us rather more to go on than earlier styles, for several reasons. Its masterworks have remained continuously before us, and although they bear the marks of many changes in musical, vocal, and theatrical practice,  generational transmission has preserved at least the adaptations of “how it’s done” that we think of as traditional interpretation. Even the postwar revivals of, say, the Donizetti “Queen” operas in international houses have occasioned spadework on how it was done, and some of those commercial studio recordings brought listeners performances that opened standard theatre cuts and reflected contemporaneous musicological investigations. Further, the very earliest recordings bring us examples of singing that, while they don’t take us back quite to the school’s first interpreters, bring us much closer to “original practice” than is the case with Cavalli or Lully, Handel or Gluck, or even Mozart. So there’s a great deal to work with beyond the internal evidence of the scores and the earwitness written commentary from which we infer performance practice in the more ancient forms, and Crutchfield & Co. dig into it all with informed enthusiasm.

The Riccis, Luigi and Federico, were an operawrighting team of brothers who turned out four comic operas jointly and many others—comic, semi-seria, and tragic—individually. Crispino e la comare (1850), a “melodramma fantastico-giocoso” for which Luigi evidently wrote most of the music, was their greatest success, at least in terms of longevity. It was “standard rep” in Italy, and an occasional item elsewhere, throughout the latter half of the 19th century, and the Metropolitan staged it as late as the 1918-1919 season, with Frieda Hempel, Antonio Scotti, Andrès de Segurola, and Sophie Braslau (as the titular comare) in the cast, Gennaro Papi conducting. According to the Met annals, Hempel interpolated Benedict’s Carnevale di Venezia into the score, presumably in place of the original rather charming waltz-song for the happy-ending finale. At one of the Met performances Crispino was paired, rather weirdly, with Stravinsky’s Petrouchka (the company had a resident ballet troupe in those days). It lasted three performances, then vanished from the local scene till Teatro Nuovo’s revival.^(I)

Crispino is a work of high craftsmanship, not genius. Its melodic invention, individuation of character, and overall comic panache cannot compare with the better comedies of Donizetti or Rossini. It is, though, an eminently playable, intermittently witty little opera in mid-Ottocento buffa style, standing in somewhat the same relationship to those Donizetti and Rossini works as Paisiello’s Barbiere di Siviglia to Rossini’s. Though the humble cobbler Crispino and his wife are certainly the “leads,” it is very much an ensemble piece, and the thing that held my attention at the Teatro Nuovo performance was the spectacle of a cast of youngish Americans (just one native Italian, as Crispino) engaged throughout in quite natural sung conversation with one another within its conventions, handling the sentimental moments with sincerity and making their marks of comic characterization without resort to overly demonstrative “bits.” Whether any of these voices could open out to the principal roles of the genre’s great tragedies (e. g., Lucia or Norma) I’m not sure, but all were fully up to the demands of their assignments and able to register personal presence and technical command sufficient to their solo opportunities. The orchestra, under Jonathan Brandani, made a full, mellow sound, always in close collaboration with the singers, and the stage-pit balance was consistently superb. ^(II)