Listening to opera can be hard work, as any concert-goer, however well-seasoned, will confirm, and in my experience the ominous term ‘concert performance’ rarely bodes well – especially if the work in question is a somewhat obscure early Mozart opera which was last performed in the UK in 1998. However, on the evening of 8 March 2012, Classical Opera Company, conducted with verve and unflagging energy by its founder Ian Page, reminded a rapt audience not only of the musical brilliance of Lucio Silla (K.135), but of the fearless commitment and youthful exuberance Mozart shares with the current generation of young musicians, through whose extraordinary performances the composer’s music seemed to come alive – despite, or perhaps rather because of the limitations placed upon the production by its format. As Ian Page suggested in his pre-concert talk, the aim of this evening’s concert performance was to tell the story through the music, unencumbered by the need for ever more outrageous production designs and elaborate displays of stagecraft. It was a resounding success.

Lucio Silla premiered on Boxing Day 1772 in the Teatro Regio Ducal in Milan and is the product of the final of Mozart’s three journeys to Italy between December 1769 and January 1773. By the time the sixteen-year-old composer departed Salzburg for Milan in late October 1772, he had already fulfilled two successful commissions for the Milanese court: Mitridate, re di Ponto (26 December 1770) and Ascanio in Alba (17 October 1771). Like Mozart’s first opera, the initial production of Lucio Silla was riddled with difficulties. The principal singers, Anna Lucia de Amicis and the castrato Venanzio Rauzzini, did not arrive in Milan until three weeks before opening night, and the tenor who was to create the title role of Silla withdrew at short notice, forcing Mozart to reduce the character’s four arias to two to accommodate the inexperienced replacement that took his part. The first performance of the opera was scheduled for the afternoon of December 26, but, as Mozart’s father Leopold reports in a letter dated 2 January 1773, ‘the performance started three hours late, with the result that it did not finish until two o’clock in the morning’. Apparently, having had a late lunch, the Archduke felt compelled to compose his New Year’s greetings cards before repairing to the Teatro for an evening of musical amusement. Mozart Sr. remarks drily: ‘I ought to mention, he writes extremely slowly’. As a result of this unfortunate chain of events, singers, orchestra, and audience were forced ‘to wait impatiently in the overheated atmosphere’. Nevertheless, despite this, the unintentionally funny antics of the inexperienced tenor, and the rivalry between de Amicis and Rauzzini on that first night, Lucio Silla went on to run for twenty-six performances in total – a staggering success for the teenage Mozart.

Composed to a libretto by the Italian poet and dramatist Giovanni de Gamerra, the opera reimagines the motives that led the Roman general and tyrant Lucius Sulla (c. 138-78 BC) to resign his dictatorship and retire into private life in 81 BC. It contains some of the most challenging vocal music ever written, especially in the soprano arias in Act Two. We join the action with the secret return from exile – now punishable by death – of Cecilio (sung with tremendous feeling by mezzo soprano Rowan Hellier), whose bride Giunia (fiery and delightfully dramatic soprano Natalya Romaniw) the tyrant Silla (tenor Anthony Gregory) hopes to win for himself. Cecilio’s return is discovered, attempts by his friend Cinna to bring about the dictator’s assassination fail, and Giunia faces marriage to the abhorred Silla while Cecilio resigns himself to an ignominious death, giving rise to some of the opera’s most beautiful set pieces, including Giunia’s virtuoso arias ‘Ah se il crudel periglio’ and ‘Fra i penser più funesti’, and Cecilio’s superb final declaration of love, ‘Pupille amate’. Of course, Lucio Silla would not be an eighteenth-century opera without a happy ending, and accordingly, Act Three concludes with a general pardon, two pairs of lovers happily united, and Silla’s magnanimous abdication accompanied by the applause and general goodwill of his people.

The work boasts a number of truly atmospheric, one might even say, dark moments, none more so than the extraordinary tomb scene in Act One which ends with the Chorus ‘Fuor di queste urne dolente’, a haunting invocation of Rome’s departed heroes, delivered with simmering intensity by the Lucio Silla Chorus. Yet for all that, the opera betrays some of the energy and irreverence that characterises so many of Mozart’s celebrated later works. As Ian Page put it, he wrote young music for young people, and this evening’s performance by Classical Opera Company testified to its transformative power.

The strongest performance, both in terms of sheer vocal prowess and dramatic range, was without a doubt delivered by soprano Natalya Romaniw, one of Classical Opera’s Associate Artists. A graduate of the Guildhall School of Music with an already extensive array of operatic roles to her credit, she commands an extraordinary range and stage presence, and displayed an admirable commitment to the role of Giunia. She seemed to negotiate her arias, which contain those technically highly demanding coloratura passages Leopold Mozart described as ‘new and quite especially and astonishingly difficult’ with apparent ease, eliciting well-deserved and enthusiastic applause.

Mezzo soprano Rowan Hellier as the hero Cecilio got off to a less lustrous start, but won over the audience completely with her extraordinarily warm voice, which has an astonishingly beautiful and introspective quality to it. She shone particularly in ‘Se a morir mi chiama’, in which Cecilio reluctantly agrees to leave Giunia behind to avoid discovery, and in the aforementioned ‘Pupille amate’.

Eleanor Dennis and Katherine Watson in the roles of Lucio Cinna and Celia, Silla’s sister, gave thoroughly elegant performances. Dennis’s first aria, ‘Vieni ov’amor t’invita’, set the highest standard for the performances that were to follow, while Watson in particular lent a nonchalant charm to her portrayal of Celia which nevertheless seemed to suggest something of the character’s conflicted allegiances, to her brother the tyrant on the one hand, and to Cinna, her secret love, on the other.

Technically the role of Lucio Silla is the smallest, but it places a tremendous responsibility upon the singer, a responsibility which for the duration of this night’s performance lighted on Anthony Gregory’s shoulders, who is currently completing his musical education at National Opera Studio. As the title character, Silla drives the plot of the opera and provides his antagonists with the emotional material that shapes their own distinct musical personalities. However, since Mozart was forced to reduce the role for the original performance, Silla has to do so – and render his own motives credible – within two isolated arias, placed in the middle of Act One and leading into the trio ‘Quell’orgoglioso sdegno’ which ends Act Two. As expressions of anger, frustrated passion, and vengeance, both demand a strong dramatic range, expressivity, energy, and fire, qualities which Gregory, as yet, lacks. He commands a very fine lyrical tenor which seemed more at ease in the accompanied recitatives, but here seemed somewhat out of its element, a minor glitch due possibly to nerves and perhaps, to some extent, inexperience.

Like the music it specialises in, Classical Opera Company is a young company, founded with the express aim of discovering and launching the careers of young vocalists and instrumentalists. At this evening’s performance of Lucio Silla, both the singers and the orchestra, led in an energetic though somewhat hyperactive fashion by Bjarte Eike (violin), commended themselves to the audience by their ability to paint a vast array of musical colours, by bringing their own tangible excitement about the music to bear upon their performances, and by mustering the courage to do so without reservation. Among the illustrious array of artists who have performed with Classical Opera are Sally Matthews, the late Philip Langridge, Gerald Finley, Mark Padmore, and Susan Gritton, to name but a few. As the enthusiastic reception of tonight’s soloists suggested, a new generation of musicians is already in the making, looking, perhaps, not only to tread in the footsteps of their well-established colleagues, but to forge their very own musical identities through innovative approaches to and interpretations of Mozart’s music – the composer, one cannot help but think, would be delighted.