Bru Zane

The masterpiece of French opera – Gounod’s ‘Faust‘ – still has surprises in store for us. Originally conceived in the spirit of opéra-comique, the 1859 score alternated between spoken dialogue and music, intermingling witty comedy and Romantic pathos. It is that ‘first Faust’ that the Palazzetto Bru Zane reveals in this recording, and particularly the many numbers that were subsequently deleted or altered.

Offenbachs La Périchole (1868) will never cease to delight music lovers of all persuasions. Marc Minkowski long one of the composers prophets was keen to pay tribute to him with this world premiere recording on period instruments, in the company of the young school of French singers, including the bewitching Aude Extrémo, the dashing Stanislas de Barbeyrac and the hilarious Alexandre Duhamel. Combining fashionable rhythms with the most unexpected touches of folklore, the score is a veritable flood of hit numbers. How can one not be swept away by the insolence of the Seguidilla, the frenzy of the Bolero or the furious rhythm of the Prison Trio? Never before, perhaps, had Offenbach gone so far in caricaturing political leaders nor used drunkenness to resolve the imbroglio of inextricable sentimental relationships. And indeed, the Tipsy Arietta is one of the composer's best-known numbers. Cheers!

After Polyeucte (1878), Gounod tackled the operatic genre for the last time in 1881 with what is probably his most ambitious work, Le Tribut de Zamora. The action takes place in ninth-century Spain – from Act Two onwards, on ‘a picturesque site on the banks of the Guadalquivir before Córdoba’. Here Gounod – finally noted more for his neoclassical pastiches (Le Médecin malgré lui and Cinq-Mars) and his ardent Romanticism (Faust and Roméo et Juliette) – was given an opportunity to display his talents as an orchestrator and colourist in an exotic setting. He produced an epic in the tradition of French grand opéra, with numerous ensembles and showpiece airs.

There is more Spain in Offenbach’s brain than in Spain itself’, said a journalist entranced by Maître Péronilla. Understandably so, given the charm and humour of this operetta in which no fewer than twenty-two characters are kept busy unravelling a preposterously complicated love story. And the libretto is all the better for having been penned by the composer himself.

According to Berlioz, Spontini was – after Gluck – the greatest genius of French music to pave the way for the Romantic era. And it may well be that the little-known Olympie, premiered in 1819 and subsequently revived in 1826 under the modified title Olimpie, had a greater influence than we have hitherto imagined on the massive upheaval that was to set French opera on the path of the modern ‘grand opéra’. From start to finish, this finely polished score, with its astonishing orchestration, is full of spectacular effects that clearly look forward to Les Troyens of Berlioz.