Rameau: Zaïs

Opera no 49

Rameau: Zaïs 

Soloists

Les Talens Lyriques

Christophe Rousset

I wrote in last year’s blog how the discovery of the music of Rameau has been one of the most important developments of my musical  life. https://andrew365newpieces.blogspot.com/2025/03/rameau-la-princess-de-navarre.html. So I was very much looking forward to the Rameau in this year’s project.  I was not disappointed. I have listened to all of the Rameau operas which have been recorded (which is pretty much all of them now) so I couldn’t pick anything new, but I chose one which I didn’t know very well.

What a superb piece, which has everything which one expects from Rameau. Right from the start with the extraordinary overture we have a composer in completely mastery of the dramatic form. Nobody else was writing for the orchestra in quite this way in the 1740s. The dance music is captivating and the choral writing exciting. And there are plenty of arias and ensembles in a bewildering variety of moods. Altogether an absolute masterpiece and undoubtedly one of the highlights of my listening year.

Purcell: Dioclesian

Opera no 48

Purcell: Dioclesian

Soloists

English Baroque Soloists

John Eliot Gardiner

After the discussion of the links between English and French music in opera 47 it was inevitable that I would cross back over the channel and taken in some Purcell.  I know  Dido, King Arthur and The Fairy Queen reasonably well but I don't think that I have head any of Dioclesian before.

Purcell's operas (other than Dido) present real problems in performance. They are usually termed semi-operas because the main characters are spoken roles and the music is largely for minor characters, dancing, interludes and choruses. Performances with the complete spoken text would be virtually impossible today. At the other extreme the performance of King Arthur I saw in London some years ago dispensed with dialogue completely and simply presented the music as as series of largely unrelated tableau.

It is of course the music that keeps these pieces alive. While I didn't think that there was anything in Dioclesian which quite matched the supreme moments in the other three works I have mentioned (but then, what does?) there was still some very attractive music here. Perhaps it took a while to get going - some of the early music was a little perfunctory in places but as it progressed there was some really impressive material here, including in particularly some of the music for the soprano soloists.  There is also a bit of the 'hey-noon-no' about some of the opera (nothing wrong with that of course) as well as moment of rare beauty. Purcell's ability to set English words is incomparable - but as I said in opera 47 there are also moments when one could swear that the music was written by a Frenchman!

Charpentier: Medée

Opera no 47

Charpentier: Médée 

Soloists

Les Arts Florissants

William Christie

After several early baroque operas which didn't really leave much impression today's choice had a much greater impact. By 1693 opera had moved away from the world of Monteverdi and Cavalli toward the world of Rameau and Handel. This is a particularly fine example of a French Baroque opera. It has all of the ingredients you could expect, including both lyrical and dramatic arias, important parts for the chorus and some impressive orchestral writing. Some of the music does really pack a punch and, for me at least, this is where we start to feel that composers are writing operas that need no special pleading or interventionist editing. The music and drama really do speak for themselves. Oddly there were several passages in the opera which reminded me of Purcell. I know we think of him of as a master of English music (which of course he was) but there is more than a tinge of French influence in his music. It shows that at least by this time in the 17th century opera was beginning to become an international language. More on that tomorrow.

Cavalli: La Calisto

 Opera no 46

Cavalli: La Calisto

Soloists

Glimmerglass Opera

Jane Glover

I can't say that I got much pleasure out of this opera. Like the Monteverdi (opera 45) I have vague memories of seeing the Glyndeborne production on television but I don’t remember any of the music itself,

The music was not unpleasant in any way but I didn’t find much to latch onto. One of the problems was that I didn’t have a libretto so  couldn’t really follow what was going on other than at a very basic level, The other was that this was a recording of a live performance so at times gales of laughter almost drowned the music - there nothing unfunnier than a joke that you can’t understand.

This was an abridged edition of the opera edited by Jane Glover, who was one of the first female conductors to achieve any sort of fame in this country. She also wrote the leading book on Cavalli in English. To me the edition sounded idiomatic - not too plain but not over elaborate either. It is just unfortunate that I didn’t find the music very interesting.

Monteverdi: Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria

 Opera no 45

Monteverdi: Il Ritorno  d'Ulisse in Patria

Soloists

Concerto Vocale

René Jacobs

Of the three surviving Monteverdi operas this is the least known. I do have a vague memory of seeing at least some of it on television in the days when opera on mainstream TV channels was not a rarity, but I certainly did not remember any of the music.

This is a generation on from the Peri (opera no 44) and the format is gradually becoming something more like we expect from opera. There is more distinction between the arias the the recitative and an altogether greater sense of dramatic pacing.

Of course there are many editorial decisions to be taken in performing an opera like this. I followed it with the manuscript score on line. Much of this is only written in two parts - a vocal line and a bass line. There is no indication of instrumentation let alone dynamics or speeds. The performance I heard years ago would have been in the Raymond Leppard version which now does seem over romanticised. But a performance with just a basic continuo line would be very hard work.  The conductor here, in his extensive booklets, talks through some of the problems and explains that he had attempted to steer a middle course between the extremes, though he accepts that some people will be scandalised by what he has done!  I'm no expert in the music of this period but it seemed to me most of the time that he had got it about right. But it did seem to become a little more interventionist as it went on - at times I did think that the instrumental additions were overdone - particularly some duetting passages for cornetti - effective as they undoubtedly were. 

It would be fascinating if a set of performing materials for this opera ever turned up. It might give a completely different perspective to our experience of Monteverdi the dramatist.

Peri: Euridice

Opera no 44

Peri: Euridice

Soloists

Ensemble Arpeggio

Roberto de Caro

This is where is all started. Euridice is the earliest serving opera. (Peri’s earlier opera Dafne has not survived). It is of course very different to any of the operas I have listened to so far in this project. It is largely made up of recitative with some madrigal-like passages for combined voices and a few purely instrument moments. To be honest I was expecting to be rather bored by in fact much of it was rather compelling. The vocal line is very flexible and there are some surprising harmonic twists and turns. The most obviously dramatic moment is the repeated interjections of the chorus after the news of the death of Euridice - this was genuinely moving.

Of course any performance of a piece like this has to be conjectural. We don’t really know how the music sounded originally, what instruments were used and how the text was articulated. But to me this performance did seem credible - it was quite stripped back and a long way removed from the sort of reconstructions that Raymond Leppard did 50 years ago when performing Monterverdi and Cavalli. Though who is to say that those composers might have loved the way he approached his realisations. There was only one moment where some additional recorded parts seem to come in from nowhere and twitter away for a a while before disappearing again. 

This sort of opera is probably very difficult to bring off in the theatre but as a purely aural experience it was attractive and well worth hearing. It is a good start to the next part of this project.

Taneyev Oresteia

 Opera no 43

Taneyev The Oresteia

After a couple of shorter Russian operas back to something on a much larger scale. This was a hugely impressive piece, perhaps the most impressive in this series of Russian operas. It is full scale work full of big set pieces, lyrical passages and real excitement. Indeed at times the number of climaxes piling up one after another became a bit overwhelming. The music style was eclectic. It was obviously Russian but there were plenty of sections which were clearly related to French and Italian models and some Wagnerian overtones. There was even a passage near the beginning that heard cold I would have identified as Elgar!

The end of the opera was particularly exciting - a big choral climax which rang in the ears long after it was over. Altogether this was a memorable experience and one which makes me eager to hear more of Taneyev’s music - unfortunately this was his only opera.

This is the last in this short series of Russian operas. It has been fascinating. We know so little of the 19th century Russian operatic repertory - basically Boris and Eugene Onegin - that almost everything else comes as a surprise. It also shows that the work of the lesser known composers is capable of vying with the major figures - in fact the only real disappointment in this group was the Tchaikovsky.

The next phase in this project will be very different - I will be exploring some of the very earliest operas - a repertoire which is almost completely unknown to me.

Cui: A Feast in Time of Plague

Opera no 42

Cui: A Feast in Time of Plague

Soloists

Russian State Symphony Orchestra

Valeri Polyansky

Cui is the least well known of ‘the five’. He is remembered, if at all as a miniaturist and as a rather fearsome critic, I sampled a suite of his last year https://andrew365newpieces.blogspot.com/2025/03/cui-suite-no-3-in-modo-populari.html and I found it quite pleasant without it making much of an impression.

Cui wrote 8 or 9 operas (the no depends on how you count collaborative works). This short piece is the only one I could find a recording of. It packed quite a punch in its 35 mins involving as it does 5 soloists (plus a silent character) and a chorus. It was obviously the work of a Russian composer but was clearly also within the mainstream European tradition.  I enjoyed it a lot and had more trident for the composer after I had heard it than I had before.  It is a late work -  a reminder that Cui was the last survivor or ‘the five, dying as late as 1918, by which time he must really have seemed a fish out of water. The piece could certainly be attractive on stage today, though it is difficult to see how what it could be coupled with. It is one of four pieces based on Puskin’s Four little tragedies’ - the others are by Dargomyzhsky (The Stone Guest), Rimsky-Korsakov (Mozart and Salieri) and Rachmaninov (The Miserly Knight). Putting all four on on the same evening would however be something of a marathon.

Mussorgsky: The marriage

Opera no 41

Mussorgsky: The marriage

Soloists

USSR Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra

Gennadi Rozdestvensky

In last year’s project my Mussorgsky piece was Kovanchina an opera on the largest scale with all of the characteristics that one would expect from a big 19th century Russian opera. https://andrew365newpieces.blogspot.com/2025/03/mussorgsky-kovanchina.html

This opera is about as far removed from that (and indeed Boris Godunov)  as one can imagine. It is more in the style of a conversation piece with only a small number of characters in a simple domestic setting. Mussorgsky here was doing some that Dhagomiskhy was also attempting in The Stone Guest  (something I also listened to last year)., ie write an opera which had no recitative or arias but was in a continuous arioso, rather like a sung play. To mind my Mussorgsky was much more successful, perhaps because this was a much shorter piece.

But this is another example of the seeming inability of the 19th century Russian opera composers to actually finish anything properly. This was it seems going to be a much longer work but Mussorgsky only completed the first act before turning to other projects. And he never orchestrated it. Early performances were with piano accompaniment. The orchestration in this version was by Rozdesvensky, the conductor of the performance. To start with I found it quite attractive but soon I felt more and more that it was quite out of touch with the musical language. It inhabited an early 20th century sound world much more reminiscent of Stravinsky in pieces such as as Mavra. Ultimately it became really irritating.

All in all I found it a difficult piece to assess. Partly because of the orchestration issues but also because without following all of the nuances of the Russian language in translation I did feel that I didn’t get the real experience of what the opera must be like to a native speaker. But I am glad that I heard it, though I can’t imagine that I will return to it in a hurry.

Dargomyzhsky: Rusalka

Opera no 40

Dargomzhsky: Rusalka

Soloists

Moscow radio and TV orchestra and chorus

Valdimir Fedoseyev

Last year I included Dargomyzhsky's The Stone Guest as part of my 365 pieces projecthttps://andrew365newpieces.blogspot.com/2025/07/dargomizhsky-stone-guest.html. That was a strange piece in which the composer set the text in something halfway between recitative and aria. It was worth listening to once just to hear what it was like but I didn't think that it really worked. This opera was much more conventional and is another example of the intermediate era between Glinka and The Five/Tchaikovsky.

I thought that it was a very uneven work. There were some quite gripping passages of ensemble, particularly in the later part of the opera, where the composer showed true dramatic flair. But parts of its were rather trivial and cliche-ridden and frankly, rather dull. There was no real sense of unity about the opera - one got the sense that all sorts of pieces from very different types of scores had been thrown together.

In the last act there is some very curious passages in which a young girl speaks lines over music - she is supposed to be the voice of the heroine  who died many years earlier in the water. It is a most disconcerting effect on record - it seems to be part of a completely different piece - though I suppose that it might have been effective in the theatre. The whole episode is just really odd.

So after two really good operas (no 38 and 39) by middle generation Russian composers it was I suppose too much to expect a third.  This was too uneven a work to have anything like the same impact as those two previous scores had. But then, the whole point of this project is to listen to as many different operas as possible and not all of them are going to be masterpieces.