Gounod reviews

This is boys having fun. And the CD is at its best when the composer is having fun too. So Rolando Villazón and Ildar Abdrazakov make the most of Donizetti’s Act I duet from L’eslisir d’amore, with Villazón a plaintive love-sick Nemorino and Abdrazakov a snake-like Dulcamara.

This new disc from the South African soprano covers similar territory to her previous, prize-winning debut disc. She begins with a nigh-on immaculate account of the waltz song from Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette. To the Mad Scene from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (her previous disc included different extracts) she brings a pure and ethereal tone, entering into the character and her poignant situation within a world of her own beyond earthly reality.

In little more than a decade Marianne Crebassa has established herself in the first rank of a new generation of mezzo-sopranos. A former Paris Opera young artist, she sings at Salzburg and Berlin as well as in Paris, and has already made her American debut in Chicago.

Is it fatuous to say she’s as fair of face as she is of voice? I hope not: those Tatar cheekbones, like Nureyev’s, are going to be a trademark as Aida Garifullina dazzles in roles like Rimsky-Korsakov’s other-worldly Snow Maiden. Her Natasha in the Mariinsky’s latest production of Prokofiev’s War and Peace was as moving as Yelena Prokina’s and more intense by far than Anna Netrebko’s. True, she has limits, and I hope she won’t push the voice into unsuitable repertoire like Netrebko has.

This version of Gounod’s ‘star-crossed’ lovers was recorded in 2002 when Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna were the opera world’s favourite young lovers. Much emotional water has flowed under the bridge since, which gives this recording some poignancy. But not for very long in this curious version of Gounod’s opera, recorded in Prague’s Rudolfinum Hall and mimed on location at the Royal Castle of Zvikov.

This is the most exciting debut album to come my way for a long time. Pretty Yende, a South African who has already made a big impression in Europe and at the New York Met, sings a selection of mainly bel canto scenes. And they are scenes, not just arias, with supporting singers and chorus, which makes all the difference. Her voice is full, already has many colours and her coloratura is effortless but also expressive – nothing she does is merely for show. 

‘The dreamt-of triumph did not materialise, but even so there was no question of having to lament a flop and, with its 57 performances, the new work took its place among the most honourable succès d’estime.’ We can only applaud the Palazzetto Bru Zane in promoting neglected operas and in providing notes that are both scholarly and unencumbered by jargon. Inevitably there are hits and misses.

Stefano Poda is a one-man band in the world of contemporary opera production. For this staging of Gounod’s popular classic, filmed in Turin in June 2015, he is credited as director, choreographer, set, costume and lighting designer – a full-house in visual terms.

Faust has always been a New York favourite. It opened the original Met in 1883 and was revived so often that one wit dubbed the house the Faustspielhaus. Now as the new Met struggles to join the 20th century, who better to direct a new production than a Broadway tyro, Des McAnuff, who piloted Jersey Boys to international success. McAnuff has a concept. Faust is a nuclear physicist who is appalled by the destruction caused by the atomic bomb and decides to poison himself.

Depressed by the gloomy plot, and bewildered because ‘the girl from Arles’ never actually appears on stage, the first audiences of the 1872  Daudet/Bizet collaboration L’Arlésienne gave it the cold shoulder. Or was the music just too good, taking attention away from the story?

Written on the composer’s deathbed, the Requiem piles cliché upon cliché. The recording (not a world first as advertised) is dull, the singing no better than amateur. Roger Nichols

 

In Goethe’s original Faust Mephistopheles is defeated by love he can only interpret as lust. Gounod’s librettists Barbier and Carré made a similar mistake, trivialising the opera by reducing Faust’s hunger for life to juvenile randiness.