Donizetti 24

Coming in at a tidy three hours and eight minutes, Donizetti’s huge Les Martyrs, composed (or adapted) for Paris in 1840, is here presented in its fullest conceivable form, including ballet and many passages cut right after the first performances. The opera was a reworking of his 1838 Poliuto, composed for the San Carlo in Naples, which had been banned by the king himself, since Christian martyrdom under the Romans was found unpleasant by the censors and the king was devoutly religious.

Since its foundation in 2013, the Berliner Operngruppe has made a name for itself by giving annual, semi-staged first performances in Berlin of works such as Donizetti’s Deux hommes et une femme and Betly, together with other operatic rarities. This album is the world premiere recording, made on 14 May 2023, of Donizetti’s opera Dalinda, a work that had a brush with the censors, similar to that experienced by his opera Lucrezia Borgia, and disappeared unperformed until it was rediscovered a few years ago by the musicologist Eleonora Di Cintio, in whose critical RICORDI edition it’s heard here.