Le Violon de Crémone “Cet instrument silencieux” | Donizetti | Michael Spyres, Carlo Rizzi & E. Thom

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Michael Spyres, Carlo Rizzi and Eloise-Fleur Thom perform Donizetti's Le Violon de Crémone “Cet instrument silencieux” live in studio as a part of Opera Rara's Donizetti Song Project. One of Opera Rara’s most ambitious projects in its fifty-year history is to record the complete solo songs of Gaetano Donizetti. A handful of these songs have been long known and often performed; many more were listed in specialist catalogues but very rarely if ever performed; others still were completely unknown or thought lost and have now come to light.

Recent research connected with this project has made clear that, in total, Donizetti wrote some 200 solo songs over the course of his thirty-year career. Making modern editions of this vast corpus has been a challenging task: the songs are dispersed in European libraries and beyond, often having been casually given away at the time of composition (typically as a present to the dedicatee).

In their totality, these compositions make a powerful case for Donizetti as a key figure in nineteenth-century domestic music-making: someone whose achievements in this area deserve to be better known; a body of work that, single-handedly, makes a powerful argument for the importance of the Italian “school” in a field long dominated by German and French composers.