Verdi- Oberto

[yashin]

Have just purchased the DVD from Bilbao.  I don't know much about Oberto.  Anyone recommend any other recording?  I have seen the cd with Michele Pertusi (a live recording) and the one conducted by Mariner.

Any advice on this one?

[Wendell_E]

I've got the Marriner recording on Philips, and it's pretty good.  Not that I've ever heard another performance to compare it to.  It includes an appendix with several numbers that didn't make it into the final opera.

[Sean]

I bought the Orpheo recording (around 1989)- it's a great debut work and compared with say Le villi or Die Feen has the more assurance and identity with future developments- it's already solid early Verdi. (However the second opera his first comic opera, is much more interesting and original, and like nothing until Falstaff, if then.)

More and more Verdi is needed, then more, and more.

[T-C]

I think that Puccini's first opera, Le Villi is much more interesting than either Oberto or Die Feen (which is not Wagner's first opera...). Le Villi's libretto is weak, but the music is charming, from beginning to end. Puccini's strong melodic invention is evident here as his skilful use of the orchestra. The great tenor aria in act II is the first in a line of brilliant tenor arias he will compose later. In Oberto there is a strong belcanto influence, not much of the originality Verdi will show later, and the melodic invention is not especially remarkable, at least to my ears...

[Sean]

Le Villi is charming but issuing from a very germinal state of mind with spare if colourful textures and rather tight and insecure if original melodies. What I meant about Oberto isn't that it the invention is strong but that it's quite securely in his idiom- though that's perhaps unsurprising for its formulaic period...