After 18 months and eight albums, Opera Rara’s mighty Donizetti song project finally comes to an end with a final volume from bass-baritone Nicola Alaimo – picking up where he left off six albums ago.

By this stage listeners know the drill: first-hand, lightly-worn scholarship from Roger Parker (whose “Lockdown project” turned into years of rummaging through digital archives and physical libraries across Europe and North America); exemplary accompaniments from Opera Rara’s artistic director Carlo Rizzi; collaborations with a crack team of Italian-repertoire specialist singers; a vivid sleeve note from Jonathan Keates, who has a Donizetti biography in the works. And, to cap it all, the chance for the songs to have an ongoing performing life thanks to Parker’s new critical edition.

So what do we get to unpack in this last box of delights? In a collection dominated by songs of a few minutes’ duration it’s hard to look past Il conte Ugolino – a 20-minute scena from the 1820s that shows a young composer experimenting boldly. The scenario from no less than Dante’s Inferno lends itself to sophisticated musical treatment, but also plenty of dramatic colour as the Count (gnawing on the skull of his enemy) recounts his dramatic death. Alaimo keeps things the right side of melodrama, letting the natural colours his voice – heroic and glossy at the top, with a wonderful breadth at the bottom) do the work. Lyrical passages rarely last, but are a feast of Bellini-anticipating, long-breathed melody.

Elsewhere there’s fun from “chant diabolique” La Hart – compared by Parker to Verdi’s Macbeth music for the witches – with its slithering, angular little piano phrase and “Abracadabra” refrain, mined by Alaimo for its deliciously crunchy consonants. At the other extreme we get Sì o No – an elegant, piquant take on comic song: Donizetti with a distinctly French accent. The influence of the composer’s time in Paris is everywhere through the recital, sometimes more mannered (as in Quand un soupçon mortel with its politely expressed jealousy, musical tears that swell but never fall, lest they stain…), and sometimes more harmonically and formally daring as we hear in the strange chromatic twists and textural spareness of Un Coeur pour abri.

A comprehensive project like this allows for some curiosities. Here they take the form of two different versions, heard back-to-back, of the same song. Troppo è vezzosa la ninfa bella is a pretty pastoral love-song, probably from Donizetti’s early-career. Differences Parker describes as “startling” aren’t quite so striking on the ear, but offer an example of the composer’s porous works, always open to revisiting and reworking. Another novelty is Le départ pour la chasse with its unexpected horn obbligato (played by Nicholas Korth). Intended as part of a (never completed) collection of songs with different solo instruments, it’s a good-natured homage to the skill of Paris’s brass players, as well as a colourful piece of musical narrative whose hairpin turn into gothic melodrama is deliciously handled here by Rizzi, Korth and Alaimo.

While this is – for now – a complete set of Donizetti’s songs, the inclusion of “latest discovery” O doloroso addio (found, Parker says, “in the nick of time”) reminds us that this is a living project. The ephemerality of these songs, often given away to dedicatees and friends, surviving in just a single manuscript, is abundantly clear. Might there yet be a Volume 9? Watch this space.

Listen on Apple Music

Composer: Donizetti
Works: Complete Songs Volume 8
Performers: Nicola Alaimo b-bar, Carlo Rizzi p
Label: Opera Rara 9293802612