PORTUGAL: Le Donne Cambiate.(Review)

PORTUGAL: Le Donne Cambiate [] Russo, Ferraz; Vaz de Carvalho, Rodrigues, Lobo Da Silva, de Villalonga; City of London Sinfonia, Cassuto. Text and translation. Marco Polo 8.225154

Marcos Portugal (1762-1830) is a name unfamiliar to all but the most erudite opera-lovers -- undeservedly so, to judge by this winsome farsa giocosa. Portugal was trained and composed his first operas in his native Lisbon, then undertook the peripatetic lifestyle typical of late-eighteenth-century composers, enjoying great success in Italy and in Rio de Janeiro, where he served as mestre de capela for the exiled Portuguese court. This 1999 Marco Polo recording advertises itself as the first commercial release of a major work by Portugal, who composed some fifty operas. Shorn of its apparently extensive recitatives, Le Donne Cambiate is heard in a reconstruction of its 1804 Lisbon version; the opera had its premiere in 1797 at Venice's Teatro San Moise.

While the graceful, high-spirited score recalls the buffo idiom of Cimarosa and Paisiello, the characters and plot devices of Le Donne Cambiate anticipate those of Rossini's early works -- notably La Cenerentola -- albeit with a rather misogynistic spin. The "transformed women" of the title ...