Rossini: Matilde de Shabran

Opera 25

Rossini: Matilde de Shabran
Soloists
Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia
Riccardo Frizza

Rossini is one of my great enthusiasms. I’m gradually working my way though the lesser known operas and I was delighted to discover this piece. What a cracker it is!  It absolutely fizzes with energy and excitement in a way that nobody in my experience has been able to match.  It is very much an ensemble opera with lots of hair-raising episodes which must be a nightmare to get together in the theatre. Recordings have a definite advantage there.

But these are also some highly attractive solo numbers, including one with an astonishing obligato for solo horn (a nod perhaps to Rossini’s horn-playing father), some extremely demanding coloratura for the tenor soloist and a final aria for the Soprano that simply blows you away. What an opera!

Pacini Saffo

Opera 24

Pacini: Saffo

Pacini is another of those Italian 19th century opera composers who had been squeezed out between Donizetti/Bellini and Verdi. I don’t think that I had heard anything of his before - perhaps the odd extract on one of the Opera Rara compilation CDs.

I have to say that my first impressions were not positive. I thought that most of Act 1 was full of clichés, indeed at times it seems almost like a parody of Italian opera. But things changed in Act 2 - there was a really impressive duet for two female voices and some dramatic ensembles at the end of the Act, which ended with real energy and drama. 

The third act also had some high quality music, The sombre music as the crowd gathers to watch the heroine leap to her death off a cliff was genuinely moving and brought to mind Spontini and serious Rossini in places.

So after a poor start I really got into this opera. Overall it didn’t impress me quite as much as the Mercadante which preceded it in this project but I was still very glad to have heard it.

Mercadante: Orazi e Curiazi

 Opera 23

Mercadante: Orazi e Curiazi

Soloists

Philharmonia Orchestra

David Parry

Mercadante didn’t feature in last year’s 365 new pieces project. That’s quite a surprise looking back because he is a good composer and thanks to various compilations on the Opera Rara label I have head quite a few extracts from his opera. I did also listen to his version of La Vestale a few years ago.

I thought that this was a splendid opera. Verdi is the obvious point of comparison and I think that Mercadante comes out of the comparison pretty well. He doesn’t have the melodic gift of Verdi and neither does he have the same mastery of concision. But on its own terms it works very well.  Some of it is pure ‘blood and thunder’ but that is all part of the appeal and Mercadante certainly whips up some impressive energy. He is also a very innovative orchestrator - the score has all sorts of interesting touches. I genuinely think that if this was a Verdi opera it would be performed with some regularity. As it is one has to be grateful to Opera Rara for all its efforts in promoting Mercadante as an important figure in 19th century Italian opera. 

Messager: Fortunio

Opera 22

Messager: Fortunio

Soloists

Chorus and orchestra of L'Opéra de Lyon

John Eliot Gardiner

Messager was an important figure in French musical life at the end of the 19th/beginning of the 20th century. He was much admired as a composer who kept refreshing his approach as tastes in lighter operas developed but also was much in demand as a conductor both in France and abroad (including the UK). Most famously he conducted the first performance of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande.

I’ve always enjoyed his music - last year I included his Les P’tites Michu as one of the highlights of my year’s listening.  https://andrew365newpieces.blogspot.com/2025/01/messager-les-ptites-michu.html.  I had come across this opera in Susan Graham’s lovely collection of extracts from French Operetta but this was the first time that I had heard the full opera.  It is a lovely piece. Messager brings such an elegance and sophistication to all of his work and the opera is full of the most beautiful solos and ensembles. The more vigorous parts of the score are perhaps a tad conventional but overall this was a work of the highest quality. With much French music of this period the distinction between ‘serious’ and ‘light’ opera almost disappears. Any composer of the time would have been proud to have written it.

Mehul: L’Irato, Ou L’ Emporté

Opera 21

Mehul: L’Irato, Ou L’Emporté

Soloists 

L’arte del mundo

Werner Ehrhardt

This was a real curiosity. Mehul is a composer that I admire. I listened to Uthal as part of my project last year https://andrew365newpieces.blogspot.com/2025/01/mehul-uthal.html. He was an important figure in the development of French Opera and was notable for the dramatic effects he achieved. This work is very different. It is supposed to have been written as a tongue-in-cheek jest. The story is that Napoleon had a preference for lighter Italian fare and was concerned that French opera composers were writing works that were so serious. So this piece was performed anonymously before the Emperor, who enjoyed it but was then amazed to see Mehul take the stage for a bow at the end of the performance. 

I don’t think that Mehul took the piece at all seriously. It is full of cliched gestures taken from Italian opera but distorted and made quite absurd. But then there are moment where Mehul feels the need to remind us that he was a ‘proper’ composer by writing some quite complex and advanced chromatic harmony which I don’t think is intended to be treated as a joke.  All in all it is a very odd piece and while I was happy to have heard it once I can’t imagine that I will ever want to hear it again. And it is impossible to imagine that the opera could ever be revived on the modern stage.

Offenbach: Vert Vert

Opera 20

Offenbach: Vert Vert

Soloists

Philharmonia Orchestra

David Parry

Offenbach really is a very fine composer. Some of my orchestral colleagues tend to look askance at me when I say that, particularly if their only experience of the composer is hacking through the Can Can at the end of popular music concerts. But he is a composer of real distinction with a thorough musical eduction and a mastery of many styles. The opening here for example would have given the young Verdi a real run for his money.  

The opera is something of a rarity and it was only this recording which re-established any sort of recognition for the piece. That is surprising, because this is a high-quality opera. There are plenty of moments where Offenbach lets rip as only he can but generally the mood is more gentle and reflective that some of the better known pieces, with several numbers that belong to the same world as the Barcarolle from the Tales of Hoffman. I’ve never heard an Offenbach opera that I didn’t hugely enjoy and this one certainly gave me a lot of pleasure. The Vert Vert of the title is a parrot!  I can’t begin to explain how he features in the plot but be assured that all end happily ever after. 

Catel: Les Bayadères

Opera 19

Catel: Les Bayadères

Soloists

Solamente Naturali

Didier Talpain

This was a fascinating work. Catel turns up several times in association with Berlioz, who used Catel’s harmony primer in his early musical eduction. Berlioz was known to be an admirer of this opera. It comes as a real turning point in French opera as the various elements which ultimately became French Grand opera as we now know it. So some of this score sounds as if it could have come straight out of Don Giovanni or The Magic Flute but there are also strands of Gluck and Cherubini among others as well as some distant memories of Rameau. But the forward looking elements of the score belong to the same world as La Vestale, which Spontini was working on at more or less the same time. Indeed they share the same librettist - Ettienne de St Jouy - who would go on to write the libretto of William Tell.

So from a historical perspective a really interesting work - it its own right it is hard to see that it could ever become a repertory work but I am glad that I was able to hear it.  The recording comes from in invaluable series of French opera recordings on the Bru Zane label, which have enabled me (along with many others) to hear properly recorded performances of works which would otherwise have been available  - it at all - though dim off-air recordings or on transcripts from scratchy 78s. I am sure that I will return to it several times more in this year’s project.

Lalo: Le Roi D'ys

 Opera 18

Lalo Le Roi D'Ys

Soloists

Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra

Hungarian National Choir

Gyorgy Vhesegyi

Le Roi D’Ys is one of those operas which has not completely faded from memory due to its presence in the record catalogues. The overture often tuned up in collections of French operatic overture and some of the solo numbers were staples of the early days of 78s. But performances are rare and I certainly had not heard it before.

To start with I thought that it was going to be one of those light operettas based on folk music - it certainly started that way. But it soon developed into much more serious fare with some moments of real drama. Perhaps more than that, however, it is the lyrical music which really made the greatest impression. The Aubade was a favourite of many lyric tenors and has a real charm. But there are plenty of other solo items and ensembles which make this a really enjoyable piece to listen to. It is perhaps not quite of the first rank - but as this project shows, and I hope will continue to show, there are plenty of other operas which don’t quite make the cut but which still some hours of pleasurable listening.  

Saint-Saëns L’Ancêtre

Opera 17

Saint-Saëns L’Ancêtre

Soloists

Tokyo Philharmonic Choir

Monte-Carlo Philhamonic Orchestra

Kazuki Yamada

Saint-Saëns is a composer who I have got to admire more and more in recent years. He quite often is dismissed in patronising terms - as a composer of enormous talent but no genius.  I'm gradually getting to know his operas. The fabulous Bru Zane recordings of 19th and early 20th century French music are a hugely important addition to the CD catalogue and I will be returning to them several times in this project.

L'Ancêtre is Saint-Saën's last opera. It was commissioned for the opera at Monte Carlo which in the late 19th century was in many ways an outpost of the Paris Opéra.  It had some early success but then, like almost all of the composer's operas, disappeared from view. That is a great pity. I didn't think that this was an out and out masterpiece but it had plenty to capture the imagination. Perhaps it got off to a bit of a slow start but by Act two its really started to catch fire and there were some highly impressive ensemble and moments of drama. It is quite a short piece and perhaps that it is one of the problems preventing it from establishing even the shortest toe-hold in the repertory. You would feel short changed if this was the only work on the programme but combining it with another opera would make for a long evening - at least for modern audiences, who don't have the stamina of audiences 100+ years ago who would expect to be entertained for three or four hours as a matter of course.

More exploration of French opera tomorrow.