Franco Alfano is best known today for completing Puccini’s final scene of Turandot, a task that—under the baton of Toscanini—effectively whitewashed much of his distinctive musical personality in favor of a style more closely aligned with Puccini’s own voice. Yet in his own opera Risurrezione one glimpses Alfano’s true compositional identity, markedly distinct from Puccini and from his Italian peers in the verismo tradition.

The opera, in four acts with a libretto by Cesare Hanau and Camillo Antona Traversi based on Tolstoy’s novel Resurrection, premiered in Turin on 30 November 1904. The story opens with Prince Dimitri rekindling a past passion with the orphaned Katiusha, an encounter that leaves her abandoned and pregnant. In subsequent acts she descends into destitution, prostitution, and is falsely convicted of murder—ending in deportation to Siberia. Dimitri, stricken by guilt, follows her there and offers marriage, but Katiusha refuses, ultimately finding redemption in solidarity with the political prisoner Simonson rather than in romantic reconciliation.

In this recording, Magda Olivero rises magnificently to the role of Katiusha. She brings to the character her signature vocal security and a refined abandon that matches the emotional extremes of the material. Her rendering of the Act II aria “Dio pietoso” is heartbreakingly intense and phrasing rich beyond measure.

One hears in this performance the genuine voice of Alfano: orchestration that occasionally evokes Puccini, but with harmonic touches suggestive of Debussy and a more varied timbral palette. The result is an affecting drama that foregrounds moral and psychological transformation over melodramatic excess.