The last 100 years have not been kind to Cimarosa's best known opera, Il Matrimonio Segreto. First performed in Vienna in 1792, just two months after Mozart died in the same city, this dramma giocoso (label attached to Don Giovanni) was hugely popular in the 19th century.
Da Ponte admired the libretto (which was based on Colman and Garrick's English comedy The Clandestine Marriage, in its turn inspired by Hogarth), while Rossini found the score hugely influential, and Verdi called it a "true comedy in music". But since then stagings have become increasingly scarce, modern audiences preferring either the greater psychological insights of Mozart, or the melodic exuberance of Rossini.
This concert performance, by the French group Les Talens Lyriques, directed by Christophe Rousset, had no translation - after a Barbican technical problem - to help the audience through the plot of the Bolognese merchant
Geronimo attempting to marry off one of his two daughters, Carolina, to the nobleman Count Robinson, until he eventually discovers that she is already secretly married to his own secretary Paladino.
Directing the performance from a fortepiano, with which he accompanied some of the recitative, Rousset ensured the performance never lacked sparkle or dramatic momentum, with orchestral playing that was always crisp and transparent.
The same forces have just performed the work on stage at the Théatre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, and though that definitely lent a extra edge to the interactions between the characters, it was odd to see music stands for the singers, and some of them earnestly following their scores.
In the cast of six, the women definitely outpointed the men. Laura Giodarno and Anna Maria Panzarella were the daughters, neatly contrasted in tone and demeanour, while Bernarda Fink was sumptuous and touching as Fidalma, Geronimo's widowed sister, the only one whose ambitions the opera denies.
Matteo Peirone was the bombastic Geronimo, Jeffrey Francis the wimpish Paolino, and Lorenzo Regazzo the predatory Count Robinson.
