Opera

Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Violanta is half a double-bill of one-act operas that this remarkable wunderkind composed in his mid-teens. It was premiered in Munich in 1916. At times the score is mesmerisingly gorgeous, with opulent, Jugendstil-like orchestration. Often it has drawn acclaim for the precocity of its sensual, supposedly psychological love story.

The tale nevertheless could seem more Mills & Boon than Freud. We’re in Renaissance Venice at carnival time. Violanta hates Alfonso, who seduced her sister, who then committed suicide, and orders her husband, Simone, to murder him – but at the crucial moment she decides she is in love with Alfonso herself and takes the fatal dagger blow in her own breast. This libretto, by Hans Müller, is so clunky that a more mature composer would likely have rejected it. More seriously, the continually heightened state of the music requires a performance that does not drag it down under the weight of its own richesse.

This recording, from a production in Turin which has won wide acclaim, suffers first from a patchy cast. There are decent accounts from Annemarie Kremer as an imperious Violanta (despite vague diction) and Norman Reinhardt as the attractive