Bizet 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.

A century after Enrico Caruso, Giuseppe De Luca and Frieda Hempel adorned the Met’s first and only previous production of Les pêcheurs de perles, Bizet’s ‘other’ opera returns to New York in Penny Woolcock’s thoughtful production.

The label quotes a review asserting that Francesca Zambello’s production ‘lends itself especially well to film’. I can’t altogether agree. The production’s first DVD recording was shadowy, atmospheric, turbulent and galvanised by Antonio Pappano’s conducting but still ultimately somewhat stagy. This second version, filmed in 3D and now re-released in 2D, seems much less lively and yet more contrived. Some of this listless air stems from Constantinos Carydis’s uninspiring conducting, still more from the substantial and overdone restaging for 3D.

Classic Beecham accounts reissued in improved sound. The French forces are a touch wayward in the Symphony, but the RPO’s L’Arlésienne suites are magical. Christopher Dingle

Old-fashioned beefy voices and execrable French, with ponderous conducting by Bernstein, this classic Met recording is effectively remastered to SACD from the four-channel original.

Even the best composers are allowed to turn out a dud from time to time (Beethoven’s Battle Symphony, anyone?), and Bizet’s overture Patrie is a fairly blatant example. Bizet said it celebrated a Polish victory over the Russians in 1792, but in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War French audiences not surprisingly felt it came nearer home. They loved it, as did Massenet, the dedicatee, but it hasn’t worn well.

The Pearl Fishers is widely known for that duet. But ‘Bizet’s other opera’ has other highlights, including the nostalgic tenor aria ‘Je crois entendre encore’ and the soprano’s ‘Comme autrefois’. Its mildly exotic/erotic Oriental atmosphere is a gift to an imaginative producer, as ENO’s recent staging brilliantly demonstrated.

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?

In 1857 the 18-year-old Bizet was a joint-winner in a competition organised by Jacques Offenbach to discover talented new composers of operetta; his co-winner was Charles Lecocq, who would go on to become a master of the genre, whereas Bizet would concentrate on opera. Nevertheless, the light touch that helped him succeed with this hour-long comedy – based on Sheridan’s play St Patrick’s Day – is characteristic of Bizet’s other student works, such as his delightful Symphony in C, and even later pieces.

Sex-free Carmen is an oxymoron. This was the opéra-comique that broke the mould and scandalised Parisian audiences in the 1870s, the work that remapped the route from desire to death in the opera house. Suddenly Emile Zola’s voluptuous, immoral Nana had gatecrashed Ambroise Thomas’s expressive Mignon, making for a very different kind of party.

This Casadesus version of Clovis et Clotilde comes some 20 years after his first (recorded on Warner), and if he was hoping for a more sonorous acoustic this time, he must have been pleased. But otherwise it’s hard to feel the reprise has been justified. 

Bizet’s cantata, which won him the Prix de Rome in 1857, contains some lovely moments and a few characteristic things, even if the influences (of Gounod, Donizetti, Weber) are still detectable.

Hard on the heels of the Met Carmen comes this intimate Paris Opéra-Comique production, recalling its premiere in the company’s old house. Significantly the sleeve names moving spirits John Eliot Gardiner, producer Adrian Noble, orchestra and chorus – but only one singer, Anna Caterina Antonacci.