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Classical

ROSSINI: 'MATILDE DI SHABRAN' WITH ANNICK MASSIS AND JUAN DIEGO FLOREZ (DECCA)

If you enjoy "The Barber of Seville," give this "new" Rossini opera a chance. It really is pretty new, since it was premiered incomplete in Naples in 1821 (music from other composers filled out the parts Rossini hadn't yet composed), then with all music by Rossini later that year, and never again until the 1996 Rossini Festival in Pesaro, the city of the composer's birth. One reason for the opera's 175-year neglect is the difficulty of the central tenor role of Cuor di Ferro ("Ironheart"), a cruel medieval misanthrope who is tamed by a clever woman and a brave poet.

At the Pesaro production the tenor canceled and a then-unknown Juan Diego Florez make an unscheduled debut. Now the leading tenor of his time, Florez repeats his part in Pesaro's 2004 revival, with the brilliant French coloratura Annik Massis -- a recent Pittsburgh Opera favorite in "Lucia di Lammermoor" and "La Traviata" -- in the title role. The libretto, silly and tremendously complicated, is a comic melodrama, and much of the music is reminiscent of Rossini's beloved "Barber," written five years before "Matilde." There are hilarious buffo arias for the physician Alprando (Marco Vinco) and other characters, plus rollicking ensembles marked by Rossini's trademark crescendo. Riccardo Frizza conducts the Symphony Orchestra of Galcia with crisp baton technique, and manages to make this intricate score sound like fun from first note to last.

-- Robert Croan, Post-Gazette senior editor

HAYDN: 'ORLANDO PALADINO' CONDUCTED BY NIKOLAUS HANONCOURT (DEUTSCHE HARMONIA MUNDI)

Haydn's "heroic-comic" opera, "Orlando Paladino," was commissioned for the visit of the Czar of Russia to the court of Esterhazy in 1782. After the first performances it was forgotten until the late 1950s, when musicologist and Haydn specialist Karl Geiringer discovered a copy of the score. Geiringer put together the first performances since Haydn's time of excerpts -- at Boston University, where he was teaching, and on WGBH-TV. Complete performances and a recording followed. This is actually the second complete recording (not counting a pirated DVD version from Vienna), and it's a first rate performance all round.

"Orlando Paladino," for all its obscurity, is a remarkable opera, foreshadowing in many ways Mozart's "Don Giovanni," composed five years later. Like "Don Giovanni," "Orlando" is a mixture of tragedy and comedy. Its hero is a quixotic romanticist, with a servant who even gets a catalogue aria akin to Leporello's. And like Lorenzo Da Ponte -- librettist for Mozart's three greatest operas -- Haydn's Carlo Badini categorizes the opera's female characters into three types: noble, passionate and soubrette. There are even Mozartean ensemble finales at the end of the first two acts.

The music is wonderful -- tailored to the quirks of each character -- and the cast, led by tenor Michael Schade in the title role, is exemplary. Harnoncourt's conducting emphasizes dramatic contrasts and 18th-century instrumental sonorities, to splendid effect.

-- Robert Croan