This is living proof that all re-discovered masterpieces in fact are not necessarily masterpieces. Some, like this one, aren’t even close. Meyerbeer wrote his Semiramide in 1819 (about four years before Rossini’s), and it’s clearly the work of a young, inexperienced composer. The plot isn’t exactly the same as Rossini’s, and frankly it’s even dumber–Semiramide spends the opera disguised as her own son and nobody notices. It’s a typical early 19th-century work, with arias, cabalettas, duets, and ensembles, but given Meyerbeer’s later work, we can only be amazed at the lack of interesting or catchy melodies and the paucity of the scoring.
The conductor/graverobber here is the estimable Richard Bonynge, who cuts big chunks of the score (it apparently was a very long evening’s show back in 1819; here the opera runs about 2 hours), but you can hardly complain. Granted, if Bonynge had been leading one of his great 1960s and ’70s casts–Sutherland, Horne–then we might have basked in the glorious singing despite the utter uninventiveness of the music. Instead we have Deborah Riedel in the title role, recently heard as an excellent Sieglinde in Melba’s new Walküre, but here thoroughly miscast and clumsy most of the time. Surrounding her are a relatively good mezzo named Fiona Janes, who might not sound as good in better company; tenor Filippo Adami, who has the notes and agility but an unappealing tone; soprano Olga Peretyatko, whose pretty voice turns shrill at the top; a woolly bass named Wojtek Gierlach; and Leonardo Silva, another tenor, with little to do. The chorus is understaffed and the orchestra plays without refinement. Meyerbeerians, as I am, will be curious; others need not apply.
