In summer 2019 we will present Stephen Storace’s lively two-act comedy about unhappy newlyweds Gli sposi malcontenti (1785), under the title Bride and Gloom. The company has already staged Storace’s other Viennese opera Gli equivoci (The Comedy of Errors) with great success in 2000-1. The production will be designed and directed by Jeremy Gray and conducted by Anthony Kraus, and will be sung in English. 

Stephen Storace’s Gli equivoci (The Comedy of Errors), one of the most significant of the many operas rediscovered by Bampton Classical Opera over the past 25 years, proved to be a revelation. The Timescommented: “the forgotten Storace, like steak-and-kidney pudding, is a victim of the inverted snobbery of the English” and praised the “brilliantly handled” extended ensemble finales, the “deft and delicate scoring” and the surprising maturity of this 24 year-old English composer, collaborating at that time in Vienna with Lorenzo da Ponte. 

A year before Gli equivoci, in 1785, Stephen was commissioned by Emperor Joseph II to produce his first opera Gli sposi malcontenti. The commission undoubtedly stemmed from the Emperor’s infatuation with Stephen’s sister, Nancy Storace, then engaged as prima donna in the imperial Viennese Italian opera.  Despite little experience as a composer, Stephen had absorbed many of the latest musical trends through his recent travels in Italy with his sister, and in Vienna through his close friendship, and perhaps study, with Mozart.  Although the first performance of Sposiwas hardly smooth – Nancy lost her voice during the first act and retired from the stage for several months – it nevertheless entered the repertory of the Burgtheater and was subsequently well-received in Prague, Leipzig, Vienna and Paris. 

As with Salieri’s  La scuola de’ gelosi and La grotta di Trofonio, both performed by Bampton in recent years, Gli sposi malcontenti was one of a web of rival operas which had their direct effect on Mozart and Da Ponte in the creation of Figaro and Così fan tutte– a frenetic quintet involving hiding on and behind a sofa and a whirlwind finale of mistaken identities in the garden suggest that Storace’s librettist Gaetano Brunati knew Beaumarchais’ then-banned play Le mariage de Figaro.

The plot concerns an unhappy and listless marriage between Casimiro and Eginia, and the unsettling presence of past lovers and would-be rivals.  Brunati’s libretto is sharp and the pacing dramatic and varied. Storace’s operatic music is characterised by a keen understanding of ensemble, often piling in the voices in ever-changing textures, orchestration and tempi.  It is in fact a refined and luscious Viennese concoction, more Sachertorte mit Schlagthan steak-and-kidney pudding.

Gli sposi malcontentiwas never performed in England in the 18^thor 19^thcenturies, although Storace reused much of its music in his varied English-language operas in London.  The English premiere was given by Opera Viva at King’s College in London in 1985, but it has not been performed since.

Bampton Classical Opera stages productions in rural venues in Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire as well as regularly in London at St John’s Smith Square.  Other significant venues and festivals have included Wigmore Hall and Purcell Room, Buxton Festival, Cheltenham Festival and Theatre Royal Bath.  Eschewing familiar repertoire, Bampton concentrates instead on rarities from the late eighteenth century, sung in lively new English translations, and has given many enterprising performances of forgotten operas. Amongst these have been UK premières of Bertoni Orfeo, Marcos Portugal The Marriage of Figaro, Paer Leonora, Benda Romeo and Juliet, Gluck Il Parnaso confuso, Philemon and Baucis and Salieri Falstaff.           

Margaret Skeet
Margaret Skeet PR

The strength of Stephen Storace’s remarkable but little-known achievement was founded on an international background and perspective which enabled him to create a fertile synthesis of Italian, Viennese and English musical culture. His father, Stephano, was a talented Neapolitan double-bass player who, like many compatriots, sought to further his career abroad, working in Dublin in 1750 and later in London where he married Elizabeth Trusler, the daughter of the proprietor of the Marylebone Pleasure Gardens.  Stephano soon became ‘Stephen’ and adjusted to English life with enthusiasm, speaking and writing the language with fluency.  Elizabeth and her father were celebrated pastry cooks and their “fruit tarts, rich cakes and almond cheese-cakes” made with the “finest Epping butter” were much admired at musical events in Marylebone.  Whilst playing in the important annual Italian opera season at the Kings Theatre, Haymarket, Stephano was also busy arranging concerts and occasional operas at the “Marrowbone” Gardens and was responsible for translating and mounting al fresco Italian operas, including Pergolesi’s La serva padronain 1761.

Stephano and Elizabeth’s two children, Stephen, born 4 April 1762, and Anna Selina, known as Nancy, born 1765, benefited from their parents’ many musical and theatrical contacts both in England and Italy.  Nancy’s birth came a few months after the sensational visit to London of the 9-year old Wolfgang Mozart and his older sister Nannerl, and it is likely that this later inspired the Storaces to nurture and parade their own preciously-talented children.  The young Stephen was taught the violin, Stephano’s first instrument, and at the age of 12 he was sent to study composition at the Sant’Onofrio Conservatory in Naples, his father’s own alma mater.  It seems that for a while he was less interested in music than in painting, becoming a close friend of the Welsh landscape painter Thomas Jones who was also based in Naples.  Nevertheless by the time he was visited by his parents and sister in 1778, he had committed to the harpsichord and composition with greater seriousness. Although only a young teenager, Nancy was already an accomplished and acclaimed soprano in England, and in Italy her career quickly blossomed, ably supported by her loyal brother.  Opera performances, including roles especially composed for her, brought her fame and a fair degree of fortune, in Florence, Milan, Turin, Parma, Rome and Venice, whilst also enabling her brother to immerse himself in the styles and practicalities of Italian opera.

An important friendship for Stephen and Nancy was with the Irish tenor Michael Kelly, who they met on the harbour ramparts at Leghorn (is there an autobiographical reference to this in the fact that the roles of Eginia and Artidoro are described as ‘Livornese’ in the printed libretto of Sposi?) : Kelly’s later Reminiscences,one of the most entertaining of musical autobiographies, are one of the main sources (if not always reliable) for our limited knowledge of Stephen.  Their musical network included the bass and baritone singers Francesco Bussani, Francesco Benucci, and Stefano Mandini, and this whole group of singers was snapped up in Venice in 1783 by the Austrian Emperor Joseph II’s agent Count Durazzo, destined to form the new Imperial Italian opera company in Vienna under imperial patronage.  The new conditions of employment were highly favourable, and Kelly tells that “no expense was to be spared, so that the artists were of the first order”.  

In Vienna, Nancy reached stardom and, still only 18, soon commanded a fabulous salary of 3247 florins. Beginning with the role of the Countess in Salieri’s La sculo de’gelosi, which she had already sung in Venice, but which was now rewritten for her by the composer himself with additional literary input from Lorenzo da Ponte, Nancy went on to create an extraordinary sequence of operatic and concert roles, performing in works by Anfossi, Cimarosa, Guglielmi, Haydn, Martín y Soler, Mozart, Paisiello, Sarti and Salieri: Da Ponte records how she “mesmerised the whole of Vienna”, and her winning personality gained the warm affection of the Emperor himself. Although Stephen had returned to London and Bath (perhaps still harbouring ambitions as an artist), he made several trips to join his sister and mother in Vienna, and it was undoubtedly through the influence Nancy enjoyed at Court and her personal charisma, that Stephen, then 23, was commissioned in 1785 directly by the Emperor to compose his first opera, indeed his first large-scale work, Gli sposi malcontenti. The librettist was Gaetano Brunati, a somewhat shadowy and possibly scheming figure in Viennese literary circles, earling some sharp criticism from Da Ponte; he went on to write Democrito correttofor Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf.  His text for Storace was probably an original invention although conforming to many of the well-worn conventions of opera buffa: the cast with two couples dealing with uneasy relationships, an overbearing father, a parody villain intent on vendetta, and a wily maidservant are familiar in the operas of Mozart and most of his contemporaries.  Nevertheless it is a witty and sharply cynical text, well-constructed to elicit music of great variety and energy.  It seems likely that Brunati had been reading Beaumarchais’ controversial play, Le mariage de Figaro, then banned from the stage, from which he derived the scene of Artidoro hiding behind and on a sofa, and a finale of disguises and muddled identities in a night-time garden, concepts taken up by Da Ponte and Mozart when they set Figarothe following year.

The first performance was at the revered home of the imperial Italian opera, the 800-seater Burgtheater, on 1 June 1785, and should have been a triumphant occasion for the Storace family: it turned out to be something of a disaster.  The casting was illustrious (which must have helped it to survive the first-night catastrophe and to become in time a repertory piece): Nancy Storace as Eginia, Catarina Cavalieri as Enrichetta, Therese Teyber as Bettina, Michael Kelly as Valente, Vincenzo Calvesi as Casimiro, Stefano Mandini as Artidoro, and Francesco Benucci as Rosmondo, all singers of stature who were soon to create major roles for Mozart.  It has been suggested that Nancy found the plight of Eginia too close to her own unhappy marital situation, and the première certainly contributed to what has been called her annus horribilis: the previous year she had been encouraged by her mother into marriage with an English violinist, John Fisher, a man more than twice her age.  It was a deeply unsatisfactory relationship.  Within less than a month, the diarist Count Zinzendorf noted that “Fisher is beating his wife”, and later Michael Kelly wrote that “there was nothing but discord between them and it was said that he had a very striking way of enforcing his opinion”. The Emperor intervened and banished Fisher from Vienna.  Nancy was left demoralised, confused, ill and pregnant, and faced a particularly gruelling schedule of performances from the summer of 1784 and into the following year. There were many occasions when she was unable to sing, and in late January 1785 she gave birth to a sickly daughter whom she did not care for.  Nancy’s ill-health continued, with many missed performances, but she appears to have been determined to do justice to her brother’s première.  However she broke down in the first act, perhaps during her confessional first aria Ah, che invan io piango, oh Dio, la mia persa libertà – Zinzendorf noted that she “made an effort to sing but in the end didn’t succeed, which made the opera less interesting” and Kelly wrote that “in the middle of the first act, Storace all at once lost her voice”.  It isn’t certain whether she continued to the end, or whether her place was taken by Celeste Coltellini who had been appointed her cover.  Fortunately the Emperor was away in Italy and missed the fiasco.

Maria Anna, her daughter, died on 17 July, and Nancy was unable to sing for several months, causing the delay of the première of Salieri’s La grotta di Trofonio.  Her eventual return to the stage was marked by the composition of a short cantata Per la ricuperata salute di Ofelia(Ofelia was her role in Trofonio) performed on 26 September and collaboratively composed to a text by Da Ponte with music by Mozart, Salieri and “Cornetti”, possibly a pseudonym for Stephen.  It was only on 14 December that she at last performed the role of Eginia in her brother’s opera: an eager audience, in the presence of the Emperor, called her back for several encores, including one with Stephen playing the harpsichord.

Despite these upsets, Gli sposi malcontentienjoyed a fair degree of success, testimony to its dramatic and musical quality.   It was revived in Prague and Leipzig in 1786, and in Dresden in 1789 (including an interpolated aria for Bettina based on Batti, battifrom Don Giovanni). It was translated into German (Das unzufriedene Braupaar: Berlin, Hanover, Breslau) and French (Paris), and some of its music was arranged for wind ensemble by Johann Wendt.  However it was never performed in England in Storace’s lifetime, a fate also shared by his second opera for Vienna, Gli equivoci(The Comedy of Errors), of 1786.  After Nancy and Stephen returned to London in 1787, some of the music from these two Italian operas was rearranged and borrowed in his English-language stage works – Kelly commented “Storace certainly enriched his English pieces, but I lamented to see his beautiful Italian opera dismantled”.  Unfortunately nearly all of Storace’s English works are lost, at least in part: except for No Song, No Supper, only the two Viennese operas survive complete.

The first modern revival of Gli sposi malcontentiwas given at the New Theatre, King’s College London by Opera Viva on 28-29 March 1985 in a new performing edition by Richard Platt and an English translation (used tonight) by Brian Trowell, entitled The discontented Newly-weds.  The conductor was Leslie Head (a pioneering conductor of rarities on the London fringe) and it was directed by David Collins.  Opera magazine wryly reported that the scenery was by “courtesy of Covent Garden refuse skips”.  

Jeremy Gray
Jeremy Gray is the director of Bride & Gloom

The Irish tenor Michael Kelly (?1762-1826) created the roles of Don Basilio and Don Curzio in the première of Le nozze di Figaro in Vienna in 1786.  His vivid Reminiscences, published in 1826, are one of the most entertaining of musical autobiographies, and a major source of information about Storace.

A meeting in Livorno

I had on a Sicilian capote, with my hair (of which I had a great quantity, and which, like my complexion, was very fair) floating over it: I was as thin as a walking stick.  As I stepped from the boat, I perceived a young lady and gentleman standing on the Mole, making observations; as the former looked at me, she laughed, and as I approached I heard her say to her companion in English, which, of course she thought I did not understand, “Look at that girl dressed in boys’ clothes!” To her astonishment, I answered in the same language, “You are mistaken, Miss: I am a very proper heanimal, and quite at your service!”  

We all laughed until we were tired, and became immediately intimate; and these persons …. continued through life the warmest and most attached of my friends. All love and honour to your memories, Stephen and Nancy Storace!  Hewas well known afterwards as one of the best of English composers, and she was at that time, though only fifteen*, the prima donna of the Comic Opera at Leghorn.  They were Londoners… Their father was a Neapolitan, and a good performer on the double bass… He married one of the Misses Trusler of Bath, celebrated for making a peculiar sort of cake….

 [* Nancy was in fact 16 – remarkably young given her reputation and achievement]

The first performance of Gli sposi malcontenti

A new opera, composed by Stephen Storace, was produced… Signora Storace and myself had the two principal parts in it.  In the middle of the first act, Storace all at once lost her voice, and could not utter a sound during the whole of the performance; this naturally threw a damp over the audience, as well as the performers.  The loss of the first female singer, who was a great and deserved favourite, was to the composer, her brother, a severe blow.  I shall never forget her despair and disappointment, but she was not then prepared for the extent of her misfortune, for she did not recover her voice sufficiently to appear on stage for five months.

The company Stephen kept

In the interim, Storace gave a quartet party to his friends.  The players were tolerable; not one of them excelled on the instrument he played, but there was a little science among them, which I dare say will be acknowledged when I name them:

The First Violin            Haydn

The Second Violin       Baron Dittersdorf

The Violoncello           Vanhall

The Tenor                    Mozart

The poet Casti and Paesiello formed part of the audience.  I was there, and a greater treat or a more remarkable one cannot be imagined.

Stephen’s brush with the Viennese police

Four days before my departure for England, a little contre-tempshad nearly broken up our travelling arrangements.  We were supping at the Ridotto Rooms, and my poor friend, Stephen Storace, who was proverbially a sober man, and who had a strong head for every thing but drinking, had swallowed potent libations of sparkling Champagne, which rendered him rather confused.  He went into the ball-room, and saw his sister dancing with an officer in uniform, booted and spurred.  In twirling round while waltzing, his spurs got entangled in Storace’s dress, and both she and the officer came to the ground, to the great amusement of the by-standers.  Stephen, thinking that his sister had been intentionally insulted, commenced personal hostilities against the officer: a great bustle ensued, which was ended by half-a-dozen policemen seizing Storace and dragging him to the Guard-house, to which several English gentlemen followed him.  The officer of the guard was very good-natured, and allowed us to send for some eatables and Champagne; - we remained with him all night, and a jovial night we had. In the morning we departed, but Storace was obliged to tarry in durance vile till further orders.  He was not, however, the least discomfited…

I was determined to make a bold push and to get him released in the evening. I placed myself in the corridor through which the Emperor passed after his dinner, to his study.  He saw me, and said, ‘Why, O’Kelly, I thought you were off for England?’ – ‘I can’t go, Sire,’ was my answer; ‘my friend, who was to travel with me, was last night put into prison.’  I then told His Majesty who it was, and how it happened. – He laughed at the tipsy composer’s wanting to fight…. I shall give directions that Storace may be set at liberty.’  The next morning he was liberated…. I went to take leave of the immortal Mozart, and his charming wife and family: he gave me a letter to his father, Leopold Mozart, who was at the Court of Saltzbourg.  I could hardly tear myself away from him, and, at parting, we both shed tears.  Indeed, the memory of the many happy days which I passed at Vienna will never be effaced from my mind.

In the first week of February 1787, I quitted it with a heart full of grief and gratitude.  Storace, her mother, her brother, Attwood and myself, not forgetting Signora Storace’s lap-dog, filled the travelling carriage, and with four horses we started for England Ho!

Jeremy Gray
Jeremy Gray is the director of Bride & Gloom

Click here to read the preview article on Opera Today http://www.operatoday.com/content/2019/09/an_englishman_i.php

Claire Seymour

What’s the title about?

This originally Italian opera has a title typical of the late 18th century which loved light-hearted plots dealing with marital disharmony – think of Le nozze di Figaro and Così fan tutte, and several others that Bampton has performed such as Salieri’s La scuola de’gelosi.  Gli sposi malcontenti means ‘the unhappy newly-weds’, and when this opera was performed in London in 1985 (its first and only UK performance until now) it was called The Discontented Newly-weds.  That didn’t seem a title likely to draw in the crowds, so we held a small competition amongst our board of directors – won easily by Nicholas Garthwaite who invented the neat title Bride & Gloom.

Who are the characters?

Casimiro, a young business-man, recently married (tenor, sung by Gavan Ring)

Eginia, his wife, formerly in love with Artidoro, and now reluctantly married to Casimiro (soprano, Jenny Stafford)

Rosmondo, Casimiro’s grumpy father and bane of Eginia’s life (baritone, Robert Davies)

Enrichetta, Casimiro’s sister, in passionate love with Artidoro (soprano, Aiofe O’Sullivan)

Artidoro, a colourful and romantically-fickle young gentleman (baritone, Arthur Bruce)

Valente, a dull and dusty academic, author of tedious books, who lusts after Enrichetta (tenor, Adam Tunnicliffe)

Bettina, the all-important housemaid-cum-PA to Casimiro and Eginia, who sorts it all out (soprano, Caroline Kennedy)

What happens?

The character list above virtually tells the story.  Eginia has been forced by her father to ditch the unsuitable Artidoro in favour of the worthy Casimiro.  The early days of marriage aren’t running smoothly, and Casimiro is terminally gloomy.  Rosmondo - a really horrible control-freak - does all he can to make his daughter-in-law’s life a misery.  Artidoro has moved on into a delirious affair with Enrichetta, which enrages Valente and upsets Eginia.  Valente vows revenge, and plots by claiming that Artidoro and Eginia are still in love.  It’s not surprising that the brilliant Act 1 finale ends with a manic septet – “deep in pits of sulphur smouldering, see the smoke of Vulcan’s forges, there the molten rock disgorges, fiery fumes and scintillations, till the gathering exhalations, force a path past each obstruction and, erupting in destruction, blast a mountain clean away!”  Fortunately there’s a level headed servant, Bettina who, like Figaro’s Susanna, knows how to ensure that everyone lives happily ever after (except Valente).

Who wrote the text (libretto)?

Gaetano Brunati, not especially famed  - but able to write a sharp comedy with plenty of potential for ensembles and situations.  He also wrote libretti for Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf and others in Vienna, but became an enemy of Lorenzo da Ponte, who called him “stupid”.

As Bampton always performs in English, we’re using the translation by the late Brian Trowell, who was Heather Professor of Music at Oxford.  He wrote it for the London performance at King’s College in 1985, but it’s very much in the Bampton rhyming spirit!  We’re grateful to his widow, who still lives in Oxford, for permission to use it.

Who was Stephen Storace?

Storace deserves to be a much better-known name.  He was the son of an Italian double-bass player and an English mother, the daughter of the owner of the Marylebone Pleasure Gardens and a famed pastry cook (cake will be quite a theme in our production!).  Stephen’s younger sister was Nancy, one of the greatest sopranos of her day and an international star: Mozart wrote the role of Susanna in Figaro for her, and we commemorated the bicentenary of her death with a special concert in spring 2018 in St John’s Smith Square.  In 2000 Bampton performed Stephen’s second opera, Gli equivoci, The Comedy of Errors (libretto by Da Ponte) and it proved one of our greatest successes – we went on to revive it in Westonbirt and the Theatre Royal Bath.  The Times, waxing lyrically about our performance, commented: “the forgotten Storace, like steak-and-kidney pudding, is a victim of the inverted snobbery of the English” and praised the “brilliantly handled” extended ensemble finales, the “deft and delicate scoring” and the surprising maturity of this 24 year-old English composer.  Since then, we’ve long wanted to perform Gli sposi malcontenti, his slightly earlier operatic debut.  This was (also) written in Vienna by commission of the Emperor Joseph II (who had a soft spot for Nancy…). The first performance (Burgtheater, Vienna, 1 June 1785) was something of a disaster, however – Nancy, singing Eginia, lost her voice mid performance and had a breakdown, taking her out of action for several months, thus delaying the première of Salieri’s Trofonio’s Cave (performed at Bampton in 2015).

In Vienna, the Storaces became good friends with Mozart, Salieri, Da Ponte, Paisiello and Haydn.  Once back in London, Stephen turned to operas in English (sadly most of his scores went up in flames at the Drury Lane theatre and so are lost); some suggest that his very popular style ultimately led to Gilbert and Sullivan.  He was undoubtedly one of leading figures in 18th-century English music theatre, and so a natural choice for Bampton, the company praised last autumn as “Britain’s unchallenged champion of eighteenth-century opera" (Opera Now)

Storace’s style is an accomplished amalgamation, even in this early piece, of contemporary Italian opera, especially from Naples where he studied, a feeling for English folksong and popular melody absorbed through his childhood in the Marylebone Gardens where he frequently played the violin, and with an added richness derived from Mozart and the Viennese style.

Gli sposi malcontenti was one of a web of rival operas which had their direct effect on Mozart and Da Ponte in the creation of Figaro and Così fan tutte – a frenetic quintet involving hiding on and behind a sofa and a whirlwind finale of mistaken identities in the garden suggest that Brunati knew Beaumarchais’ then-banned play Le mariage de Figaro.  Storace’s operatic music is characterised by a keen understanding of ensemble, often piling in the voices in ever-changing textures, orchestration and tempi.  It is in fact a refined and luscious Viennese concoction, perhaps more Sachertorte mit Schlag than “steak-and-kidney pudding”.

Jeremy Gray
Jeremy Gray is the director of Bride & Gloom

Over the summer Bampton Classical opera performed Stephen Storace’s opera Gli sposi malcontenti, now wittily titled ‘Bride and Gloom’. As usual, they took their garden opera production to St John’s Smith Square, where I caught up with it.

Stephen Storace had links with several areas of eighteenth-century life with which Criticks readers will be familiar. For example, his father, from Naples, was a musician who had married the daughter of the owner of the Marylebone Pleasure Gardens, and he was in charge of the music there. Stephen himself had played the violin in the Marylebone orchestra as a child.

Another link with late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century life is the fact that the architect Sir John Soane was a friend of the family, having met Stephen’s sister Anna Selina, better known as Nancy, in Italy in 1780. On their return to England, Nancy and her mother were often visitors to Soane’s family at Pitzhanger Manor in Ealing.  Pitzhanger itself has recently been reopened after restoration. In the archives at the Soane Museum there are references to Nancy having dinner at Pitzhanger, along with J.M.W. Turner.

Nancy was a famous soprano of the time, and had been snapped up by the Austrian Emperor Joseph II’s agent to form the new Imperial Italian opera company in Vienna. It was due to the admiration that the Emperor Joseph had for Nancy that the opera was commissioned. It was first performed in 1785 (with Nancy taking the lead role) and was fairly successful at the time, with performances in Germany, and in Paris.

As Jeremy Gray has pointed out in the programme notes, Gli sposi malcontenti is a typical Opera Buffa, involving a complex plot with two pairs of lovers who are in love with the wrong person, various shady characters, and a maid who propels the plot along. The librettist seems to have derived several scenes from Beaumarchais’ banned play, The Marriage of Figaro (which was set by Mozart a year later). These elements include a scene in which a character hides behind a sofa, and a finale of mistaken identities set in a garden at night.

What should we expect, musically, from Storace? One review of this production is headed, a bit like the butter/marge dilemma, ‘you won’t believe it’s not Mozart’. Storace does have his Mozartian moments, most recognisable in the trios, quartets, and especially in the finales of the two acts, in which changes in musical direction support the rapid changes in plot, as each character arrives and contributes to the mayhem.

Within the structure, Storace provides each character with at least one individual stand-out aria. All the cast were splendid – fluent, musically shaped, and sung with real verve and characterisation. To my eye, these opera Buffa characters often seem based on commedia dell arte characters, with its use of fixed social types including servants, old men, and lovers. Thus, Eginia’s stalker Valente is the know-it-all doctor character, proud of his academic learning. The tenor Adam Tunnicliffe captured this essence perfectly, notably in the aria Known to Fame in fourteen faculties. This aria displays Storace’s musical wit, in his use of Baroque fugue to symbolise dry academic learning.

The tenor Gavan Ring was Eginia’s husband Casimiro, who spends most of the opera moping, and being bossed around either by Eginia or by his father Rosmondo. Ring’s rich tenor voice was expressive, and made the audience root for him, and his acting captured the slightly worthy and dull characterisation of the rejected lover. The third male voice, Casimiro’s father Rosmondo, was sung by the baritone Robert Davies. His singing had a rich depth to the tone, and this, combined with absolutely clear diction and superb acting skills, made it the highlight for me.

Of course no opera buffa would be complete without a maid, to push the plot along, paralleling Colombina in Commedia dell arte. Here, the maid, Bettina was sung by Caroline Kennedy, with a sweet clear tone, and very effective facial expression, especially in her aria Sweet peace is my only pleasure.

Eginia, sung by Jenny Stafford,had several stand out moments. One of these was her first entry, when she appears alone, introducing us to her emotional dilemma – her longing for her previous love, Artidoro (Ah, in vain I grieve and sorrow). Even at the end of the last act, Eginia is still questioning her position, in a Recitative and Aria, Oh, heaven, dare I go, dare I remain? Stafford sang this long, demanding part throughout with a delicate expressiveness, effectively capturing the emotional battles within. These were of course brought on by the powerlessness of her position, dictated by men, notably her father (not shown on stage), and her father-in-law Rosmondo. Artidoro himself (Arthur Bruce) appears to have moved on from his love for Eginia suspiciously quickly, and is now in love with her sister Enrichetta (Aoife O’Sullivan). These two provide the light relief from the plaintive singing of Eginia and Casimiro.

The singing was supported throughout with stylish playing from CHROMA, with   beautifully phrased woodwind and horn obbligati. The simple set worked well, and praise must be given to the movement director, Alicia Frost, who used the stage to convey the complexities of plot, cleverly displaying who loves whom at each particular moment.

Bampton Opera, founded by its two artistic directors Gilly French and Jeremy Gray, is now celebrating its 25th year. Next year’s production will be announced in the autumn. Do go if you get the chance, to enjoy another eighteenth-century rarity sung with joie de vivre by young future stars.

There can’t be too many prima donnas whose favoured status wins their 23-year-old brother an imperial commission for an opera and who subsequently, unintentionally, sabotages the opening night. So it was, though, with Nancy Storace, Mozart’s first Susanna. On 1 June 1785 poor health, marital breakdown and mental strain resulted in the soprano collapsing mid-Act-1 aria during the première of Gli sposi malcontenti (‘The Discontented Newly-Weds’) – which the Emperor Joseph II had commissioned from her brother, Stephen, for the opera buffa troupe at the Burgtheater – bringing proceedings to a halt.

There was no danger of such disaster at St John’s Smith Square where Bampton Classical Opera’s artistic director Jeremy Gray brought his production of Gli sposi malcontenti – retitled, with characteristic drollness, Bride & Gloom.  Presented in Brian Trowell’s English tranlsation, the opera was performed with charm and consistency, and uniformly terrific diction, by an accomplished cast of seven, with the conductor Anthony Kraus drawing lightness and lift from the musicians of CHROMA.

Gaetano Brunati’s libretto serves up the anticipated buffa recipe: a suspicious husband, a domineering father, a boorish boffin hell-bent on revenge, a pair of thwarted, scheming lovers and a wily maidservant.  Unhappily married to Casimiro, Eginia (Storace’s role) burns a candle for her former love, Artidoro, but his eyes have veered in the direction of Enrichetta, Casimiro’s sister.  Rejected by the latter, the middle-aged scholar Valente plots his revenge, aided by Bettina the maid.  Casimiro’s father, Rosmondo, tries to pack the newly-weds off to the countryside far from amorous distractions, but Artidoro and Bettina have other ideas.

Jenny Stafford and Aoife O’Sullivan, the self-centred sisters of Bampton’s 2018 production of Isouard’s Cinderella, returned here as the stepsister rivals for Artidoro’s love, demonstrating equal grace and style in shaping Storace’s tuneful melodies.  As the emotionally conflicted Eginia, Stafford’s Countess-like soul-searching was delivered with focus and gravity: she established a particularly effective musico-dramatic stature before the concluding nocturnal disguises and denouements.  O’Sullivan’s sporty, spirited Enrichetta was as adept at keeping a tennis ball aloft mid-aria as negotiating the vocal challenges of her role.

Gavan Ring’s vocal strength and character belied Casimiro’s blandness.  Ejected from his marital bed, he may have looked content with just a shabby teddy bear for company, but as Ring swelled sonorously to the tenorial high-points of Casimiro’s avowal of lingering love for Eginia he revealed an ardent heart beneath the Barbour and flat cap.  Arthur Bruce’s relaxed baritone conveyed Artidoro’s easy charm and confidence, while Rosmondo’s patriarchal pontificating was delivered with firmness and strength by Robert Davies.  Adam Tunnicliffe’s Valente, despite almost strangling himself with his academic hood, blustered and raged with bite and colour, out-tricked by Caroline Kennedy’s vivacious Bettina.

Storace evidently had a fine ear for a suave cavatina, a sure sense of how to shape an ensemble finale, and the ability to create moments of heart-warming sincerity.  His arias may lack a little variety of invention and tempo, but if he doesn’t equal Mozart for musical wit and dramatic sparkle then one imagines the latter, into whose orbit Nancy’s success drew Stephen, was not entirely unconscious of Gli sposi malcontenti’s  comic episodes – a romantic interloper hiding behind a chair, a climactic nocturnal escapade in a garden – when he wrote Figaro the following year.

Gray’s simple, witty design essentially set the action – given a ‘70s feel by the prevailing harvest-gold and burnt-orange palette – inside a wedding cake, a chaise-longue the only prop, with proceedings overseen by outsized Ken and Barbie lookalikes in their nuptial finery perched atop a gigantic slice of frosted sponge.  The busy ensembles were deftly handled, the confusions and conflicts which end Act 1 exploding in a storm of smoke, buttercream and confetti: the icing on the cake of an evening that ended, naturally, with sweet forgiveness and harmony.

On the evidence of Gli sposi malcontenti (1785), Mozart had a faithful disciple and imitator in Stephen Storace. That is not intended as a slighting or back-handed comment, but rather recognition of the younger composer's achievement. It pre-dates The Marriage of Figaro by a year, and is already a fully-fledged opera buffa, with all the exuberance and dramatic flexibility that entails, paving the way for Mozart's masterworks. Storace's first opera – commissioned by Emperor Joseph II for Vienna's Burgtheater – anticipates Figaro in several respects, particularly in Act Two's escapade around the sofa when Artidoro has to hide from Rosmondo, as Cherubino has to do the same to eschew the irate Count; and also in the Finale where various subterfuges play out in the dark, with characters in disguise, to comic confusion. Indeed it seems likely that the librettist had read Beaumarchais's Figaro play.

Storace's style is more foursquare than Mozart's, but being twenty-three when he composed the opera it is hardly surprising if he had yet to find his voice, and the resulting score is, by any estimation, competent to say the least, even if not shot through with Mozart's genius. The latter's fingerprints are all over it, nevertheless, for example in the quicksilver changes of mood and expression in response to each twist and turn of the plot; an unyielding vivacity in the music overall (the minor-key rarely registers for long); and the scoring enriched with woodwinds (aside from trumpets and drums) so that flutes, clarinets or bassoons, as the case may be, heighten the emotion of a given aria.

Rain prevented this opening performance (of what is apparently only the second-ever production in the UK) from taking place outside in the Deanery Gardens at Bampton, and so the action was re-located inside the village church. Although that curtailed the space and scenery with which the performers had to work with (in which the set should have comprised two stages of a wedding cake), in no way did that appear to hamper the exceptionally lithe choreography they had to execute in Jeremy Gray's consistently busy and insightful direction. The action is tellingly updated to the 1970s at a time of changing social opinions as a younger generation toy with more liberal attitudes to romantic relations and the notion of duty, to the consternation of the older people, represented by Robert Davies's steely Rosmondo, the father of Casimiro (Gavan Ring), the dull simpleton to whom Eginia finds herself unsatisfactorily married on her father's order, following a warmer relationship with Artidoro. In fact we can precisely date the setting to the beginning of 1973 as the front of the newspaper brandished by Rosmondo carries a story about the UK's entry into the EU, and in his aria condemning modern times, he comments on the behaviour of the younger character that the “barriers are now up” in punning disapproval.

The singers more or less unanimously do justice to their respective roles, bringing out the irrepressible liveliness of the comedy. Working with a witty English translation of the libretto that often adapts the text idiomatically, with some amusing turns of phrase and rhymes (not least in the new title), the cast enunciate their words with conviction and enthusiasm, thereby carrying the drama over clearly, vital in this context where there are no resources for surtitles.

Adam Tunnicliffe stirs up trouble as the scheming but cowardly scholar, Valente, bringing that off with vocal panache at the same time as having to manage some nimble tripping around the stage. His dilemma is that he loves Enrichetta, Casimiro's sister, who has now taken up with Artidoro instead, but he sees the chance to try and turn things to his advantage by claiming that Artidoro and Eginia are still in love, despite the latter's marriage to Casimiro. This has the semblance of truth on account of Eginia's unhappiness and surliness with Casimiro. Where Ring, in the latter role, sings with clean clarity to the point of apt ingenuousness, Jenny Stafford achieves a more determined, alluring nobility as Eginia, at times foreshadowing the Countess of Mozart's Figaro, especially in the Cavatina of her first appearance – although its lyrical simplicity and innocent pastoral tone, with its flute accompaniment, also harks back to such a number as Aminta's at the opening of Il re pastore (1775).

Arthur Bruce interprets the role of the lover, Artidoro, securely and confidently, with a certain degree of louche swagger as he appears at first smoking a joint, encouraging the servant Bettina to do the same, in Caroline Kennedy's light-toned, jolly account. Aoife O'Sullivan provides well-judged contrast to the other two female roles, as Enrichetta, with her generally steady focus and gentle tone.

Anthony Kraus and the chamber-scale Orchestra of Bampton Classical Opera make a compelling case for the score with its fluidity of form, requiring the musicians to shift gear, quickly and frequently. If the strings are occasionally thin and imprecise, the woodwinds often cover over that to sustain Storace's generally integrated textures that are as recognisably Mozartean as those which any other composer or imitator has achieved. On its own terms, this production is highly engaging and Storace's opera is revealed as a rewarding one. But it takes on an added dimension of interest by comparison with those by Mozart, and so admirers of the latter really should make every effort to take up this rare chance to deepen their appreciation of the context in which he worked.

English composer Stephen Storace was a contemporary and friend of Mozart, and his 1785 opera Gli Sposi Malcontenti contains all the essential ingredients of a Mozartian opera buffa: an unhappily married couple, a controlling father, night-time garden assignations, and characters hiding behind furniture.

The opera, receiving its second modern production from Bampton Opera, with the clever English title of Bride and Gloom, is a charmer. Storace’s sparkling score makes one regret that relatively little of his music has survived and nearly compensates for the fact he did not have a librettist of the calibre of Mozart’s Lorenzo da Ponte.

The Bampton team makes the most of this rarity, beginning with a well-directed and energetic cast and the fine musical direction of conductor Anthony Kraus. The high spirits are kept up even as inclement weather on opening night forced the entire production to abandon the outdoor stage, and its wedding cake props in favour of a nearby church.

As the miserable couple, Jenny Stafford and Gavan Ring are at their most compelling in solo arias that bemoan their marital fate. Aoife O’Sullivan as Enrichetta and Arthur Bruce as Artidoro provide light-hearted relief. Tapping more deeply into the opera’s humorous vein are Adam Tunnicliffe as Valente, a scheming scholar in pursuit of Enrichetta, and Caroline Kennedy as the faithful if frustrated servant Bettina. Robert Davies is sufficiently stern as the censorious father Rosmondo.

There’s no obvious reason for the cast to wear 1970s-era clothing, but costume designer Jess Iliff has made some amusing, period-perfect choices, especially with Bettina’s huge plastic glasses, Artidoro’s boxy, beige leisure suit and Valente’s Jerry Lewis-like nerd get-up, complete with a pocket protector.

The witty English translation by Brian Trowell has clearly been customised for the occasion and with the paper-thin plot, why not?

On the strength of this performance at Westonbirt School, Bampton Classical Opera’s 2019 production of Stephen Storace’s Gli sposi malcontenti deserves a full house at St John’s Smith Square on 17 September. With a full house, attendance at the four productions could exceed 1000 – a well-deserved achievement for a company with a fine reputation for creating pleasing surprises in the late summer months.

Following the success last year of Isouard’s Cendrillon (possible UK première), this year’s little-known 1785 composition received its première in London in 1985. Director, Jeremy Gray, was confident that no-one will have heard the work before. What chance someone in this audience could have been there? Of course there was! One well-travelled, very knowledgeable opera devotée was there and spoke highly of a memorable event! Only the vocal score remains from the 1985 version; Peter Jones has completed the orchestral score from a Dresden musical archive. Merging the two has presented Gray with new problems now overcome with aplomb.

The opening overture by the 22-piece orchestra positioned at the rear of the stage had a taste of Mozart about it but lacked the electrifying charge one associates with his work. For a second year running the conductor is unable to engage with his singers; this continues to be a frustration. With a slight loss of seating in the front rows, there could be a much improved connection between conductor and singers. Nevertheless, there was some fine wind playing; the strings were marginally less confident and less connected.

On stage, several of last year’s Cendrillon singers once again enjoyed this Storace buffa opera. Marylebone-born Storace studied with Mozart in Vienna shortly before Le nozze di Figaro was given its première. By good fortune, Storace’s sister, Nancy, appeared in the title role of Susanna in the première. By 1787 Storace had returned to London to continue writing comic operas for Drury Lane.

Bride and Gloom, as this Storace work is renamed by the Bampton Board of Directors, provides masses of opportunity for lugubrious contesting males to compete for several frolicking females. Holding the swashbuckling and frolicking in check is Bettina (Caroline Kennedy), servant to the unhappy couple Eginia (Jenny Stafford) and Casimiro (Gavan Ring). A discontented academic,  Valente (Adam Tunnicliffe) causes mayhem throughout with deceitful plans to pursue the affections of Enrichetta (Aoife O’Sullivan) presently in love with Artidoro (Arthur Bruce).

Vulgar though he may be, Tunnicliffe is ferociously skilful in his efforts to secure his objective by means of disguise and other deceitful practices. He sings with passionate vigour; in Act II he features in a delightful duet with Bettina, during which she teases him with pretend compliance to his deceitful practices. Robert Davies (Rosmondo) is a domineering influence throughout; Gavan Ring (Casimiro) gives a faithful display of being the unloved husband of Eginia – not an easy task as she continues to bring profound pathos to her role. By the end of Act I there is anguish all round with all players on stage in a state of confusion enjoying an endless supply of cup-cakes. Time for an interval tea!

The teatime detritus is cleared away, but Eginia’s melancholic mood continues as she fights to protect herself from Casimiro’s clutches. Her Recitative and Aria ‘Oh, heaven, dare I go, dare I remain?’ is assertively delivered. The scoundrel Valente continues to appear to the irritation of many but eventually decides to confess and to seek forgiveness for errors. Happiness returns in the final scene, Valente is remorseful and a degree of harmony breaks out.

Another inventive Bampton Classical Opera production moves to the completion of its run; the St John’s Smith Square performance to a full house will a very happy end to 2019’s efforts of the many involved in the production.

Last week the Office of National Statistics published figures showing that in the UK the number of women getting married has fallen below 50%.

That’s perhaps not surprising, if Stephen Storace’s comic opera  Gli sposi malcontenti (The Discontented Newly-Weds) is evidence of what might await those who take the nuptial plunge: loneliness and longing, desolation and distress, if Storace’s librettist, Gaetano Bertati, is to be believed!

But, as always, Bampton Classical Opera’s Artistic Director, Jeremy Gray, has found witty ways to make Bertati’s characters’ misery the source of our own merriment in the company’s Summer 2019 production of Storace’s opera buffa, which arrived at St John’s Smith Square after performances at Bampton and Westonbirt. And, while the premiere performance of Gli sposi malcontenti resembled a wedding-day disaster - with Nancy Storace collapsing mid-aria in Act 1, bringing proceedings to a halt - there was no danger of such catastrophe at St John’s where the consistently accomplished cast of seven presented  Bride & Gloom in Brian Trowell’s English translation, with charm, bonhomie and uniformly terrific diction. CHROMA provided light and lilting instrumental support, conducted by Anthony Kraus.

Gaetano Brunati’s libretto serves up the anticipated buffa recipe: a suspicious husband, a domineering father, a boorish boffin hell-bent on revenge, a pair of thwarted, scheming beloveds, and a wily maidservant. 

After their tantrums and tiffs as the self-centred sisters in Bampton’s 2018 production of Isouard’s Cinderella, Jenny Stafford and Aoife O’Sullivan returned here as the stepsister rivals for Artidoro’s love, demonstrating equal grace and style in shaping Storace’s tuneful melodies. As the emotionally conflicted Eginia, Stafford’s soul-searching was delivered with focus and gravity. Her opening cavatina - think the unhappy, abandoned Countess of ‘Porgi amor’ - was poised and affecting, and Stafford established a particularly convincing musico-dramatic stature before the concluding nocturnal disguises and denouements. O’Sullivan’s sporty, spirited Enrichetta was as adept at keeping a tennis ball aloft mid-aria as negotiating the vocal challenges, singing, as always, with unwavering security, and a well-centred and appealing tone.

Gavan Ring’s vocal strength and character belied Casimiro’s blandness. Ejected from his marital bed, as he nestled under a blanket on the chaise longue Casimiro may have looked content with just a shabby teddy-bear for company. But, a superb performance from Ring drew forth a rich range of developing emotions and as Ring swelled sonorously to the tenorial high-points of Casimiro’s avowal of lingering love for Eginia, we understood that beneath the Barbour and flat cap was a burning, ardent heart. No wonder that Eginia eventually comes to appreciate his hidden merits and attractions.

Arthur Bruce’s relaxed baritone conveyed Artidoro’s easy charm and confidence, cockily tossing and bouncing a tennis ball, suavely anticipating the success of his elopement scheme. When, discovered by the suspicious Rosmondo hiding under a blanket in the chair, this Artidoro did not panic when threatened by the collapse of his strategy or the bullying jabs from Casimiro, whipping out a water-pistol with the panache and poise of Indiana Jones.

Rosmondo’s patriarchal pontificating was delivered with firmness and strength by baritone Robert Davies, who achieved the difficult task of being sufficiently mean to inject credible tension but not so menacing as to preclude compromise and reconciliation. Like Adam Tunnicliffe as Valente, Davies demonstrated a good instinct for physical comedy, both singers falling over and into the chaise longue, and the wedding-cake walls, with neat timing and without undue mishap.

Despite seeming almost to strangle himself with his academic hood, Tunnicliffe’s Valente blustered and raged with bite and colour, out-tricked by Caroline Kennedy’s vivacious Bettina - a put-upon but opportunist maid who was ever on the look-out for a swig from one of her employer’s wine bottles or a smoke from Artidoro’s joint. Tunnicliffe’s dark grain was a lovely complement for Kennedy’s light, graceful soprano, especially in their final duet in which Bettina dupes the disagreeable don into believing that she will collude in his conspiracies.

Storace evidently had a fine ear for a silky cavatina, a sure sense of how to shape an ensemble-finale, and the ability to create moments of heart-warming sincerity. His arias may lack a little variety of invention and tempo, but if he doesn’t equal Mozart for musical wit and dramatic sparkle then one imagines that the latter, into whose orbit Nancy’s success drew Stephen, was not entirely unconscious of Gli sposi malcontenti’s comic episodes - a romantic interloper discovered hiding in a chair, a climactic nocturnal escapade in a garden - when he penned Figaro the following year.

Gray’s simple, witty design essentially sets the action - given a Seventies feel by the prevailing harvest-gold and burnt-orange palette - inside a wedding cake, with the proceedings overseen by outsized Ken and Barbie look-a-likes in their nuptial finery perched atop a gigantic slice of frosted sponge. The busy ensembles were deftly handled, the confusions and conflicts which end Act 1 exploding in a storm of smoke, buttercream and confetti: the icing on the cake of an evening which ended, naturally, with sweet forgiveness and harmony.

A more literal translation of Stephen Storace’s Gli sposi malcontenti, which premiered at Vienna’s Burgtheater on 1 June 1785, would be The Discontented Newly-weds. However, Bampton Classical Opera, which in its twenty-six year history has performed many little known eighteenth century operas (including three by Salieri), felt that the title Bride and Gloom equally captured the spirit of the piece and also seemed more pithy. Today Stephen Storace may be less well known than his sister Nancy, the soprano for whom both Salieri and Mozart wrote several roles, but he was a highly accomplished composer with an international outlook, having been born in London to an Italian father and travelled extensively.

Almost certainly through the influence that Nancy exercised at the Viennese Court, Stephen was commissioned at the age of twenty-three to write the opera by Emperor Joseph II himself. In the event, the premiere was not a success, with Nancy breaking down several times in the first act, and it has been suggested that the role she was playing of a woman in an unhappy marriage was too close to her own situation at the time. However, with the Emperor not being present that night, and the overall cast being so illustrious, it survived this mishap and over time enjoyed reasonable success, including revivals in Prague and Leipzig in 1786 and Dresden in 1787. The first modern revival, however, only came in 1985 when Opera Viva performed it at the New Theatre, King’s College London, utilising an English translation by Brian Trowell, which this performance by Bampton also used.

The plot, with libretto by Gaetano Brunati, sees Eginia married to the morose Casimiro. She actually loved Artidoro, but gave him up to marry the man that her father insisted upon. To make matters worse for her, Artidoro has moved on to a relationship with Casimiro’s sister Enrichetta, who in turn is also admired by Valente, an intellectual with many degrees but absolutely no charm. In an effort to get rid of his ‘rival’, Valente convinces Casimiro and his father Rosmondo that Artidoro and Eginia are still in love. His hope is that Enrichetta will turn her attentions to him if Artidoro is banned from the house, but the consequence is that the finale to Act I sees accusations fly and confusion reign.

Things do resolve themselves in Act II, following the concocting of plans, the sending of anonymous letters and a night-time scene in a garden. In the end Enrichetta is allowed to marry Artidoro, and Eginia chooses not to run away from Casimiro, accepting that she made a commitment to him and discovering that he is perhaps not so dull after all!

There are two scenes that, in particular, feel highly ‘reminiscent’ of Le nozze di Figaro. The first is the scene at the end, which takes place in a garden at night, where the darkness allows for a host of mistaken identities and general confusion. The other sees Artidoro hiding first behind the sofa and then upon it as Rosmondo himself hides behind it, just as happens with Cherubino and the Count. Remarkably, this opera was produced a year before Figaro, although it seems less likely that Mozart and Da Ponte copied directly from it than that Storace and Brunati were as acquainted with the Beaumarchais play as they were. However, given that Salieri had a similar garden scene in La scuola de’ gelosi in 1778, it seems that all of these composers and librettists were learning from each other and drawing on standard techniques, which is why we are all the poorer if we know Mozart’s operas but not those of his contemporaries. Similarly, we can see the clever ‘wheeler-dealing’ servant Bettina in Bride and Gloom as a forerunner to Despina, although even here Mozart had included an equally clever maid Ninetta in La finta semplice, which he had written in 1768 when we was twelve.  

Musically, the piece is highly accomplished. The Overture may sound more reminiscent of Haydn, but much of the recitative is practically indistinguishable from Mozart, while Eginia’s first aria feels like an ‘equivalent’ to the Countess’ ‘Porgi, amor’ as both constitute a lament on their current marital situation. However, it seems that Storace divided up the verses of the aria with recitative, which is a technique Gluck employed, but Mozart avoided. Overall, the opera comes across as being as ninety per cent as good as Mozart, and while some might see that as an overly generous assessment, to me that final ten per cent is the difference between a work that is now performed somewhere in the world every night of the year, and one that has enjoyed just two UK outings in modern times. As Bampton Classical Opera has shown, however, the sheer disparity between the amount to which Bride and Gloom and Figaro are performed is totally unwarranted, and we can certainly hope that it does enjoy many more airings in the future.    

Bampton’s production enjoyed performances in Bampton and Westonbirt in July and August, with this presentation at St John’s, Smith Square constituting the final one in its current run. Opera Today described the scenery for the Opera Viva production in 1985 as ‘courtesy of Covent Garden refuse skips’, but that is something that could certainly not be said about Bampton’s set, as the stage was dominated by two giant slices of wedding cake, one standing upright and the other on its side. They were clearly very well built, with one containing a door from which props could be produced and the other a window through which Valente frequently appeared. Smoke also appeared from them during the finale to Act I, which has the same surreal quality to that to be found in Il barbiere di Siviglia. There were also a number of subtle touches in Jeremy Gray’s staging, including Bettina giving a strong signal to Valente at the end that they were not going to get together, when we as the audience were already anticipating that they might.

Anthony Kraus’ conducting of CHROMA was superb, while all of the parts were cast from strength. Particularly impressive was Arthur Bruce’s baritone as Artidoro, but just as accomplished were Robert Davies as Rosmondo, Gavan Ring as Casimiro, Jenny Stafford as Eginia, Aoife O’Sullivan as Enrichetta, Adam Tunnicliffe as Valente and Caroline Kennedy as Bettina. Bampton Classical Opera is to be congratulated for bringing yet another little known, but highly worthwhile, eighteenth century opera to public attention, and I cannot wait to see what it has in store for next year.

LONDON-born Nancy Storace was a huge star of the opera in the time of Mozart, singing at the premiere of his hit The Marriage of Figaro in Vienna in 1786 when she was just 21. She and Irish tenor Michael Kelly also appeared in Gli sposi malcontenti (The Discontented Newly-weds), at the city’s Burgtheater the previous year, which was written by her older brother, Stephen Storace.

Most of Storace’s music has been lost, but Bampton Classical Opera have this year revived his great hit, under the snappier title Bride & Gloom, with a cast that includes two graduates of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland’s Alexander Gibson Opera School, Caroline Kennedy and Arthur Bruce. As Scottish Opera gives concert performances of two rare operas – Mascagni’s Zanetto and Wolf-Ferrari’s Susanna’s Secret – at the Lammermuir Festival, here was another forgotten work that was well worth the rediscovery.

Its similarity to the work of Mozart is uncanny, both in plot and characters and musical style, which is not to suggest that the more famous composer was guilty of plagiarism. Characters like Kennedy’s scheming maid Bettina were tropes of the theatre at the time, as were thwarted liaisons, poor disguises and hiding in and behind chairs and in gardens, all of which happen in Bride & Gloom.

If Storace does not have the genius for melody of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, his score is still lively and tuneful and it was immaculately played at St John’s by chamber ensemble Chroma, conducted by Anthony Kraus, who also played the continuo harpsichord. Jeremy Gray’s production was also blessed with a very fine cast, with Jenny Stafford and Aoife O’Sullivan as sisters Eginia (the Nancy Storace role) and Enrichetta, whose love lives are the substance of the plot.

Cleverly staged on a set made from outsized wedges of wedding cake and costumed, by Jess Iliff, in kitsch 70s style, it looked a little like a lost TV sitcom or an Alan Ayckbourn period piece. The small Oxfordshire-based company can be very proud of their inspired revival.

Premiered a year before Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro by the same company, Stephen Storace's first opera is an illuminating look at the Viennese opera world of the 1780s

The composer Stephen Storace (1762-1796) was the elder brother of the soprano Nancy Storace who created the role of Susanna in Mozart's opera Le nozze di Figaro. English-born with an Italian father and English mother, the two lived in Vienna in the 1780s where Nancy developed a significant career as a soprano and Stephen as a composer, with Stephen composing two operas for Vienna's Burgtheater, Gli sposi malcontenti (1785) and Gli equivoci (1786), the latter to a libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte based on Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors. These are Storace's only scores for Vienna, but he wrote 16 operas in English for London though unfortunately only one of these survives in full score.

Bampton Classical Opera caused something of a stir with its production of Stephen Storace's Gli equivoci in 2000, so it was with great interest that I went along to their performance of Storace's Gli sposi malcontenti (performed under the title of Bride and Gloom) at St John's Smith Square on 17 September 2019. The production, directed and designed by Jeremy Gray, debuted at Bampton this Summer and featured Robert Davies as Rosmondo, Gavan Ring as Casimiro, Jenny Stafford as Eginia, Aoife O'Sullivan as Enrichetta, Arthur Bruce as Artidoro, Adam Tunnicliffe as Valente and Caroline Kennedy as Bettina. Anthony Kraus conducted Chroma.

Gaetano Brunetti's libretto has some remarkable pre-echoes of Le nozze di Figaro (which the same company would premiere in 1786), so clearly Brunetti had been reading Beaumarchais' play; there is a scene with someone hiding behind and on a sofa, and the climactic final scene is full of disguises and misunderstandings in a garden at night! And many of the singers who took part in the premiere of  Gli sposi malcontenti, performed roles for Mozart. So that Nancy Storace (Eginia in Storace's opera) sang Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro and most of the rest of the cast for the premiere of Storace's opera pop up on roles in the Vienna performances of Mozart's three Da Ponte operas!

One of the valuable things about Bampton Classical Opera's performances is that it enables us to hear the operas which were current when Mozart was working on his operas with Lorenzo Da Ponte, so that Antonio Salieri's La grotta di Trofonio (which Bampton performed in 1785) enabled us to hear how much of a debt Mozart owed to Salieri's rich, Gluck-inspired orchestration.

Stephen Storace was rather different, he was trained in Naples (where his father came from) and Storace's orchestra in Gli sposi malcontenti accompanies the arias with relative simplicity and clarity, usually keeping the focus on the voice and making us understand why contemporary audiences could perceive Mozart's comedies as complex. And the arias were frequently in the same form (two part, fast then slow), with much of the music seemingly based on a relatively limited array of motifs. But then Storace was only 23 when the opera was performed and it was his first one. So a promising piece, rather than an undiscovered masterpiece.

Despite the recitative bowling along, it was rather too long; the first act lasted 85 minutes and seemed to need rather too much exposition and it was only in the shorter second act that the drama really seemed to keep going. Jeremy Gray's lively production set the piece in the 1970s (with a striking abstract set based on a wedding cake), but it was noticeable that whenever things flagged he introduced some physical comedy.

Plot was quite entertaining. Casimiro (Gavan Ring) and Eginia (Jenny Stafford) are recently married, she was forced into it by her father and is still a little in love with her previous lover Artidoro (Arthur Bruce). Eginia is excessively tyrannised by her father-in-law, Rosmondo (Robert Davies) and is unhappy. Artidoro has now moved on an in love with Casmiro's sister, Enrichetta (Aoife O'Sullivan), but the middle-aged bachelor Valente (Adam Tunnicliffe) is in love with Enrichetta also and he hatches a plot to blacken Artidoro and Eginia's names so that Enrichetta will have to marry him. All is helped and hindered by the maid, Bettina (Caroline Kennedy).

The work was sung in a lively English translation, originally made by Brian Trowell for the work's UK premiere in 1985. Unfortunately the acoustics of St John's Smith Square are not very sympathetic to words and though the cast worked hard, words were very much at a premium in the arias and ensembles, though the recitatives were much clearer (particularly from the men).

All the cast brought tremendous energy to the performance and a great deal of commitment and engagement, keeping the plot bowling along where they could. Jenny Stafford had some lovely moments as Eginia, a character prone to doubt and worry, whilst Gavan Ring (who recently transitioned from baritone to tenor) made Casimiro an engaging idiot who means well. you sensed that once Eginia got her odious father-in-law out of the way she would rule the roost. As Rosmondo, Robert Davies had great fun with the character's antediluvian attitudes to women!

Aoife O'Sullivan made a charming Enrichetta, more straightforwardly in love with her Artidoro, though O'Sullivan's costumes did make her look rather mature (her first outfit made us think of Margo in the TV series, The Good Live). Arthur Bruce was a very direct Artidoro, charming but very full of himself, whilst Adam Tunnicliffe had fun playing the evil, elderly bachelor. Caroline Kennedy was good value as Bettina the maid, who often got the last word and sported a very 1970s jumper!

Anthony Kraus and Chroma were placed behind the singers, which meant that Kraus had to communicate only via the monitors. It was a shame that a way could not be found for the conductor to be out front. Chroma turned in a stylish and incisive sound (the orchestration uses double woodwind and horns, plus two trumpets and timpani, and Chroma fielded just eight or nine strings).

So, not a masterpiece then, but a work well worth hearing for the light it sheds on the type of operas around when Mozart was writing and perhaps more importantly, the type of operas that the company at the Burgtheater were used to performing.