The Contrabandista – a ‘comic opera in two acts’ dating from 1867 – tells the story of the hapless Adolphus Cimabue Grigg, an English traveller who is co-opted into becoming leader of the Ladrones, a notorious band of thieves. Amid shenanigans of more than a passing resemblance to Bizet's The Pearl Fishers Sullivan successfully imbues the spice of the Spanish countryside into his score. His second opera to reach the stage, this early work – to a libretto by Francis Burnand – already shows much of the musical mastery that was to characterize so many of Sullivan's later collaborations with W S Gilbert. The work's popularity ensured a run spanning 1867 and 1868 and inspired its composer to expand much of its material into his longer opera of 1894, The Chieftain.
First performed – simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic – in 1892, The Foresters sets verses by Lord Tennyson on the theme of Robin Hood. Warmly received in the States, the work met with a distinctly hostile reception in London, where critics were less than impressed by the (American) lead soprano and gave Tennyson's libretto a roasting. Sullivan's score, by contrast, was universally recognized as being the saving grace; this new recording gives a new century the opportunity to draw its own conclusion