Opera no 144
Roussel: Padmâvitî
Soloists
Toulouse Capital Orchestra
Michael Plasson
I wasn’t much impressed by the Roussel I included in last year’s project https://andrew365newpieces.blogspot.com/search/label/Roussel but I enjoyed this a lot. It is a hybrid work - almost as much a ballet as it is an opera. It seems to me that Roussel was consciously evoking the spirit of the works of Rameau and Lully. There is nothing old-fashioned about the music itself, which is very much of its time. There are distinct traces of Stravinsky but also of Ravel and Debussy. I thought that the combination of dance and sung much worked well (as far as one can judge by just listening) and the piece did cause me to rethink my view of Roussel.
This is another, very late, example of the fascination that French composers had with the ‘exotic’ - in this instance India. I do wonder whether any of them could be performed today in anything like a ‘straight’ version in which the opera spoke for itself, or would the only hope of revival be in some form of ‘distancing’ - the director effectively using the peice as a piece of social commentary. I hope not but I suspect that that would be the only acceptable way of performing them nowadays.
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