Rare Opera Release Alert

A Giovanni Pacini opera that flopped in Venice in 1835 just resurfaced again through Opera Rara, and the cast list reads like a bel canto collector’s shelf: Bruce Ford, Jennifer Larmore, Elizabeth Futral, Roberto Frontali, and David Parry. The label’s current listing presents it as a 3-disc set running a little over three hours. (opera-rara.com) The opera is Carlo di Borgogna, first performed at La Fenice in Venice on February 21, 1835, with a libretto by Gaetano Rossi. The title character is Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, and Pacini built the piece as a three-part romantic melodrama in Italian. (wikipedia.org) The plot is pure early-19th-century opera machinery: Carlo loves Estella, but England expects him to marry Leonora of York, the sister of King Edward the Fourth. That triangle turns into duels, battlefield scenes, political threats, and a final collapse in Switzerland. (wikipedia.org, classicstoday.com) What makes the release unusual is not that Pacini was obscure in his own time. It is that this specific opera was so badly received at its premiere that one review of the recording says Pacini stopped composing for five years afterward, even though he had been turning out operas at a pace of two or three a year since 1813. (classicstoday.com) That helps explain why collectors care about labels like Opera Rara. The company has spent decades recording neglected Italian operas that were famous once, vanished, and survive mostly in archives, old librettos, and specialist discographies. (opera-rara.com, musicwebinternational.com) This recording itself is not a brand-new studio session from 2026. Discographic sources place the recording sessions in London in August 2001 with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields and the Geoffrey Mitchell Choir under David Parry, and commercial listings date the release to the early 2000s. (opera-collection.net, discogs.com, prestomusic.com) What is new this month is the push to put the performance back in front of listeners. Opera Rara has the full set on its store now, and its official YouTube channel has posted excerpts and a complete upload in recent days, turning a hard-to-find collector item into something people can actually sample before buying. (opera-rara.com, youtube.com, youtube.com) The singers are a big part of the appeal because Pacini wrote the score like a vocal obstacle course. Opera Rara highlights Bruce Ford in the title role and says Jennifer Larmore and Elizabeth Futral get a final confrontation duet of “exceptional virtuosity,” which is label language for fast runs, high notes, and very little room to hide. (opera-rara.com) Older reviews make clear that nobody is reviving this opera because it secretly outranks Bellini’s Norma or Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. They praise it instead as a lively, singer-driven score full of cabalettas, ensembles, choruses, and showpiece scenes that work especially well when the cast can attack the writing cleanly. (classicstoday.com) So the real story is not that a lost masterpiece suddenly appeared in April 2026. It is that a once-buried Pacini opera, recorded with major bel canto specialists around 2001, has been newly surfaced for streaming-era listeners who want to hear what sat just outside the standard Donizetti, Bellini, and Rossini canon. (classicstoday.com, opera-rara.com, youtube.com)