I Gioielli della Madonna CD review – stylish reading of Wolf-Ferrari's rarity

A queasy brew of incense and incest, Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s 1911 hit opera The Jewels of the Madonna is now almost forgotten, but Opera Holland Park staged it in 2013, and now comes this, apparently its first full recording, taken from a staging in Bratislava last summer. Its love triangle plot, involving a woman aspiring unsympathetically to freedom, her creepy stepbrother and a Camorrist capo, is pure kitsch, but Wolf-Ferrari’s score is skilful, starting Petrushka-style in the midst of a street party, and moving fluidly throughout between public and private, devotional and lustful. The singing is patchy, and the flat live recording does the voices few favours: at one point the male chorus is beaten by a mandolin. Yet for all its flaws the performance, conducted by Wolf-Ferrari champion Friedrich Haider, has style – and nobody’s likely to make a glossy studio recording any time soon, so this will have to do.