Auber: La Sirène
Soloists
Orchestre des Frivolités Parisiennes
David Reiland
If you had to name one composer to sum up opera comique it would probably be Auber, He more or less made the genre his own and over a long period produced dozens of works. While few of these have retained anything other than a toe hold in the repertory the overtures to several of them became mainstays of light music concerts.
I’d not hear this opera before. My initial reaction was one of surprise - indeed I thought for a moment that I had put the wrong CD into the player. For all the world this sounded like quite solemn early German romantic music which might have come from the pen of Mendelssohn. But normal service was soon resumed and the opera was full of the characterist verve and lyricism that we might expect from an Auber opera. He must have been able to turn out reams of this sort of music almost in his sleep, but every piece of his that I have heard has a freshness and liveliness which leaps of the page. It was mostly great fun, with some outrageous coloratura near the end, but there was also a really beautiful lyrical duet to remind us that Auber was not all about ‘rum-it-tum’.
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