Paisiello: Nina.(Video Recording Review)

[] Bartoli, Galstian; Kaufmann, Polgar, Veccia; Chorus and Orchestra of the Opernhaus Zurich, Fischer. Arthaus Musik DVD 100367 (Naxos, dist.), 120 mins., plus one "bonus" documentary

The wide-eyed and disheveled soprano, trilling and warbling in her dementia, is such a Romantic-era theatrical cliche that one might not be aware of her origins in Giovanni Paisiello's 1789 opera Nina, o sia la Pazza per Amore (Nina, or The Girl Driven Mad by Love). This immensely popular work--a "comedie larmoyante," neither opera seria nor buffa--was a singer vehicle long before Bellini and Donizetti made insanity a diva's best friend. And in a 2002 production from the Zurich Opera House, conducted by Adam Fischer and directed by Cesare Lievi, it proves an ideal vehicle for Cecilia Bartoli to display bewilderment, anger and tenderness as the pathetic, delusional Nina, who loses her mind after witnessing her lover's apparent death in a duel.

Late-eighteenth-century music fits Bartoli's voice and musical sensibilities to perfection. (Salieri, one of her latest conquests, was Paisiello's contemporary.) She can invest a lyrical phrase or a line of recitative with a world of expression; here she seizes the opportunity to combine melancholy, longing, infantile joy and suppressed rage in a tour-de-force characterization, vocally and dramatically complete.

In the spirit of historical accuracy that she has been ...