Mercadante’s Il proscritto was first performed in Naples, in 1842. Dividing opinion at the time (Mercadante was accused of being too Germanic in the press), it was never revived in his lifetime and remained in limbo until 2019, when Opera Rara’s artistic director, Carlo Rizzi, unearthed the autograph score in the archives of the Naples Conservatory. That in turn paved the way for a critical edition by Roger Parker and Ian Schofield, which formed the basis both of a concert performance at London’s Barbican in 2022 and this recording made in tandem with it.

Its source was Le proscrit, a popular 1839 melodrama by Frédéric Soulié and Timothée Dehay that had already been the subject of an 1841 opera by Otto Nicolai. Anxious to avoid censorship troubles, however, Mercadante’s librettist, Salvadore Cammarano, relocated the action from Grenoble after the Napoleonic wars to Edinburgh under Cromwell’s protectorate. The outlaw (‘proscritto’) of the title is the royalist Giorgio Argyll, long believed to have drowned in a shipwreck, who returns home in secret only to find that his ‘widow’ Malvina has just married the Cromwellian Arturo, ostensibly under family pressure, but also, we soon realise, out of genuine love, thereby setting in motion a conflict that eventually drives her to suicide. There are flaws of shape. Malvina’s family, dominated by her manipulative mother Anna and fanatical half-brother Guglielmo, is too sketchily drawn, while her younger brother Odoardo, played by a mezzo, is occasionally allotted a musical importance not always supported by the narrative, which in turn can impede the dramatic momentum.

The score is an at times unsteady amalgam of bel canto tradition and Mercadante’s so-called ‘reform’ style of the late 1830s, in which, under the influence of Meyerbeer, he attempted to push against the boundaries of formal convention and give his orchestra greater prominence. In Il proscritto, we consequently find set display pieces wedged against extended scenes in which arias, arioso and ensembles flow together linked by bridging passages of considerable subtlety. Odoardo, conventionally heroic, gets a grand coloratura showstopper while Giorgio and Arturo, both tenors, wrangle proprietorially over Malvina in a bravura duet in the Rossini mould. Malvina, the victim of so much male aggression, has no aria of her own, however, but is presented in constant relation to the other characters through a sequence of fluidly beautiful duets and ensembles.

Rizzi by and large makes a strong case for it, conducting with care and considerable verve throughout, and, with the Britten Sinfonia on fine form, places due emphasis on Mercadante’s striking orchestration, all oily clarinets, melancholy horns and churning strings. As Giorgio, Ramón Vargas, mature-sounding and slightly gritty in tone, broods, obsesses and threatens magnificently, while Iván Ayón-Rivas’s Arturo in contrast is altogether more youthful and elegant in his bewilderment, despair and passion. Their big confrontation is spectacularly good, as is Elizabeth DeShong in Odoardo’s aria, thrillingly sung and admirably secure over a massive vocal range. Irene Roberts’s Malvina, however, is less successful: the voice is warm and beautiful but a disengaged quality to her singing means that the heroine’s emotional agony doesn’t always register as it should. Sally Matthews, luxury casting as Anna, could do more with the words, though Goderdzi Janelidze is nicely implacable as Guglielmo. The choral singing is first-rate. Both work and performance have their flaws, in short, but this is an often fascinating set nevertheless.