Filmed at the 2022 Donizetti Festival in Bergamo, this new Favorite is at once imperfect and significant: imperfect because there is some unevenness in singing and staging; significant because it uses a critical edition by Rebecca Harris-Warwick that gives us the score absolutely complete as it was heard at the Paris premiere in 1840. In part this is a question of opening up standard cuts including the lengthy ballet, but conductor Riccardo Frizza also restores the cabaletta to the duet ‘O mon amour’ between Léonor and her obsessive lover Alphonse, dropped after the first performance, apparently because of the anticlerical implications of the text.

Alphonse, raving about repudiating his queen in order to marry his mistress, furiously replies ‘What does it matter?’ to Léonor’s desperate interjection about the Church’s opinion. Even though the opera doesn’t mince matters in its examination of ecclesiastical intervention in the private lives of rulers, there was seeming concern that this might be considered extreme. In musico-dramatic terms, meanwhile, the restored passage strikingly exposes a level of violence in Alphonse’s temperament only suggested elsewhere, immeasurably adding to our understanding of why Léonor feels so utterly trapped in their relationship.

If you care for Favorite, therefore, you will probably want to see this, though you have to be prepared for occasional inequalities. Annalisa Stroppa is an excellent actress but her tone can be plummy, her dynamic range at times unvarying and her French on occasion occluded: her Léonor is ultimately no match for Elīna Garanča on DG’s 2017 Munich performance conducted by Karel Mark Chichon. The men fare much better, though anyone familiar with Javier Camarena’s Duke in the recently issued DVD of the 2017 Barcelona Rigoletto, also with Frizza (C Major, 10/23), will notice how his voice has darkened in the intervening years. He’s similarly persuasive here, though, finely lyrical, his high notes clean and ringing, and deftly capturing the mixture of naivety, faith, desire and pride that spur Fernand on.

Florian Sempey makes a superb Alphonse, seductive, vicious (that restored cabaletta helps), yet strikingly sincere in ‘Léonor, viens’. Evgeny Stavinsky is also magnificent as Balthazar, noble of bearing, his voice wonderfully sonorous, though throughout you also sense the principled inflexibility of will that makes the man so dangerous. The choral singing is first-rate, the playing exemplary, and Frizza, impressive yet again, is wonderfully alert to the work’s slowly accumulating tensions, its moral subtlety and spaciousness of approach that gazes forwards to mid-period Verdi, La forza del destino and Don Carlos in particular.

Director Valentina Carrasco, meanwhile, tries, I think, to do fractionally too much with it. The period is unclear, as the costumes embrace everything from early 19th-century frock coats to 1950s New Look dresses. Railings and grilles draw covert comparisons between the monastery as refuge and the island of León as a kind of imprisoning pleasure palace, where Léonor is surrounded by the figures, real or spectral, of cast-off mistresses past and present. The latter, played by women from Bergamo rather than professional dancers, are allocated the rather touching ballet, exploring routines of enforced femininity and exposing deep underlying resentment. Léonor’s ostracism at court makes for uncomfortable watching but there’s little to suggest the wider political background of a country embroiled in religious war. Superb though many of the individual achievements are here, it doesn’t quite add up to an ideally coherent set, I’m afraid, despite its editorial excellence.