Edita Gruberova, the 'prima donna assoluta of belcanto' is proud to present her new production of Vincenzo Bellini's La Straniera.

Bellini is regarded as the creator of romantic Italian opera in its manifestation as ‘Melodramma tragico’. Felice Romani takes much of the credit for this too, since the language of his libretti showed a new style of expression for the passionately enhanced feelings of the characters in his tragic material. Bellini developed very much his own style of long spun-out cantilenas for these texts, which reached a previously unknown intensity of elegiac expression. And in this he consciously quashed the form of virtuoso coloratura singing which Rossini had used in his Italian operas, and which had become almost an end in itself and which he had scaled down in his French operas.

Since 2012 the opera has been performed many times with Edita Gruberova in the title role, with staged productions (Zurich 2013, Vienna 2015), alternating most successfully with concert performances (Baden-Baden 2012, Vienna 2013). These have been not only a welcome extension to this singer’s repertoire, Ms Gruberova having celebrated an unbelievable 45th anniversary of her stage debut in 2013, but also a long overdue fostering of Bellini’s oeuvre.

Although La straniera is seen, not unjustly, as a 'prima donna opera', the closing words should devolve upon the creator of the baritone role at the world première, the great Antonio Tamburini (1800-1876): ‘What can I tell you [about La straniera]? The beauties of this opera are so abundant, that I don’t know how to enumerate them all.’ That such an important work in Bellini’s oeuvre should ever be underrated because of its supposedly convoluted libretto (one thinks automatically of Verdi’s Il Trovatore, which suffered similar reproval), is something that Tamburini could not have suspected.

Recorded in November 2012, Baden-Baden, Germany.