Austerity, if musically splendid, Boccanegra

Opera North semi-stages Verdi's 1881 masterpiece in Bradford

Spellbinding: Sara Cortolezzis’s radiant Amelia Grimaldi Picture © Peter Glossop

Of all Verdi’s revisions, the Simon Boccanegra which had its premiere at La Scala, Milan, in 1881 was a harbinger of his late Indian summer. By this stage in his career, La Scala had become Verdi’s artistic home, then as now a Mecca for the greatest Italian and international artists. The success of the 1881 Simon Boccanegra - essentially a transformation of a risorgimento opera, first seen at Venice’s Teatro La Fenice in 1857 - was in no small way due to the composer’s last and greatest librettist, Arrigo Boïto. While the latter’s adaptations of Shakespeare for Verdi’s last two operas, Otello and Falstaff, place him in the pantheon of opera librettists - up there with Lorenzo da Ponte (for Mozart) and Hugo von Hofmannsthal (for Richard Strauss) - his additions to Simon Boccanegra transformed a blood-and-thunder mid-period scorcher into a sombre and subtle melodramma. Despite criticisms that the musical styles of the 1857 and 1881 versions of Boccanegra were never entirely integrated, this opera now ranks as one of the composer’s most individual achievements, with a melodic and orchestral palette - tinta in Italian - unlike any other Verdi opera.

To my surprise, Opera North has never mounted a full staging of Simon Boccanegra. Just over a year ago its chorus participated in a concert performance and recording of the 1857 version (for Opera Rara, about to be released) with the Hallé under Mark Elder, but for a company founded 45 years ago, Verdi’s Genoese opera has been a strange omission - until last weekend, when I caught its new “concert staging” at St George’s Hall, Bradford, part of the Yorkshire city’s UK Capital of Culture celebrations.