Offenbach reviews

'Jodie Devos is a gravity-defying coloratura soprano who would have thrilled the composer; and she’s certainly not the proverbial canary’

Offenbach Colorature
Songs and arias from Boule de neige, Vert-vert, Orphée aux enfers, Un mari à la porte, Fantasio, Les Bavards, Mesdames de la halle, Le Roi Carotte, Les Contes d’Hoffmann, Robinson Crusoë and Le Voyage dans la lune
Jodie Devos (soprano), Adèle Charvet (mezzo-soprano); Munich adio Orchestra/ Laurent Campellone
Alpha Classics ALPHA 437 60:59 mins

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.

This is a spectacular Tales of Hoffmann to look at, but not perhaps as serious as it should be. So there’s nothing too taxing about art rescuing life from the gutter. Or how Offenbach and his librettists skewer 19th-century images of women as domestic doll, courtesan and doomed angel of the hearth.   

Offenbach’s final work is notoriously tricky to stage, partly because of its unwieldy format – it contains three separate narratives with different settings and characters, plus a prologue and epilogue linking everything together – but mostly because the composer died leaving it incomplete.

Once we mourned the absence of a definitive version of Hoffmann because of the composer’s untimely death. Now we relish the opportunities that the uncompleted score offers to a producer. Laurent Pelly and Stéphane Denève have opted for Michael Kaye and Jean-Christophe Keck’s version for their Liceu production in Barcelona which seems as close to Offenbach’s intentions for the work as we are likely ever to get.

The discs in this series (which is what they amount to), culled from old German TV broadcasts and issued both as DVDs and double CDs, aren’t exactly exploitative but they are as close to this as dignity allows: nice for completists, but the rest of us will be wondering whether this stuff shouldn’t just have been parked on YouTube.

This is Hoffmann minus some 20 minutes of recently rediscovered music. Gedda is a stylish poet, but the voice was showing its age in 1965, de los Angeles is a delicious Antonia, but Schwarzkopf’s Giulietta is simpering when she should be sumptuous. Christopher Cook

 A beloved pet buried with due solemnity; a shy hero, Valentin, renamed Vert-Vert after that dead parrot who finds himself, and love, when he sings in public; a girl’s boarding school where two of its three pupils are married and the third is in love with Valentin/Vert-Vert and where the dancing master is secretly involved with the deputy headmistress; a regiment of moustachioed dragoons and a sexually ambitious prima donna.

Who could resist Jane Rhodes as the Voice of Public Opinion? Mady Mesplé is a properly French Eurydice, a silver-voiced foil to Michel Sénéchal’s Orphée. Michel Plasson conducts with élan. Christopher Cook

Best known in the Anglo-Saxon world as godfather to The Pirates of Penzance, there is still much to be said for Les Brigands. And John Eliot Gardiner says it all with his customary conviction in this 1988 recording of the three-Act version. Christopher Cook

These two French-label discs prompt three assertions: that Felicity Lott is the best female singer of French in the world today; that in her second language she’s a more communicative singer than in any other (including her native language); and that she’s the best sort of mature artist – the kind who refuses to rest on her laurels but goes on growing, expanding her repertoire.

Is Offenbach served up in ‘bleeding chunks’ really the tastiest way of digesting this wittiest of composers? Who cares when Vesselina Kasarova is in the kitchen. Here’s a proper mezzo with a gravelly lower register and also a brassy top to the voice as she rounds off the Can Can at the end of Orphée aux enfers. There’s a seductive lilt to the CD’s title track, ‘Belle nuit, ô nuit d’amour’ (Les Contes d’Hoffmann) with Kasarova in duet with Melissa Shippen as the Venetian Courtesan, Giulietta.