A good start

La Scala opens in December with a black-tie gala; the Metropolitan does the same in September; major opera houses around the world generally put on a feast to start the season. The Royal Opera House at Covent Garden operates differently. Instead, it offers revivals of old productions or concert performances of obscure works (such as La gioconda), often leaving some of its most high-profile shows for the end of the year. This time the Royal Opera has teamed up with Opera Rara, the record label that digs up forgotten (or nearly forgotten) scores from the nineteenth century and records them in unstaged live performances, to do Donizetti’s Linda di Chamounix. The American label and the Royal Opera had not worked together since the recording of Dom Sébastien (2005) and, prior to that, Roberto Devereux (2002), a rather good musical evening…