Offenbach: La Périchole. Aude Extrémo, Stanislas de
Berbeyrac, Alexandre Duhamel, Éric Huchet, Marc Mauillon, Enguerrand de Hys,
François Pardailhé, Olivia Doray, Julie Pasturand, Mélodie Ruvio, Adriana
Bignagni Lesca, Jean Sclavis; Chœur de l’Opéra National de Bordeaux and Les Musiciens
du Louvre conducted by Marc Minkowski. Bru Zane. $36.99 (2 CDs).
There is no conductor today who has
thought as long and hard and well about Offenbach’s stage works as Marc
Minkowski. His carefully researched and beautifully presented performances of Orphée aux Enfers (featuring Natalie
Dessay and Yann Beuron) and La
Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein (with Felicity Lott and, again, Beuron) are
so good and so complete – including the restoration to the latter recording of
major musical material that had long been omitted from performances – that any
new Offenbach from Minkowski creates very high expectations indeed. And the
chance to own a Minkowski La Périchole
from Bru Zane, an organization that is devoted to rediscovery of French musical
heritage from 1780 to 1920 and that presents recordings packaged within books
that include musical, historical and analytical essays of considerable style
and erudition, is enough to make Offenbach lovers positively giddy with
anticipation.
Yet this La Périchole, although it earns and is entitled to a very high
rating for the skill and pacing of the performance and the beauty and
intelligence of the packaging and presentation, is not quite the resplendent success
that it could have been. Minkowski is just not thinking at his highest level in
this live recording of a Bordeaux Opera production.
There are two primary issues here. One is
the lead singers: Aude Extrémo as beautiful street singer La Périchole,
Stanislas de Berbeyrac as her somewhat inept and inordinately jealous lover
Piquillo, and Alexandre Duhamel as lecherous Peruvian viceroy Don Andrès de
Ribeira. Offenbach’s absolute mastery of comic characterization in La Périchole requires genuine
singer-actors who can overplay their parts, not merely play them. None of these
three does so. Extrémo, for example, does not make her “letter song” nearly as
heart-wrenching as it can be (it is a remarkably emotionally trenchant piece
for a comic work), and she seems at most a very little bit drunk in the famous
“tipsy song.” (Singers such as Teresa Berganza and, especially, Maria Ewing
have been far superior in this role.) Berbeyrac has his own chance for an
anguished aria after being thrown in prison, but his repeated exclamations of
worry about what La Périchole is doing while he lies in the dungeon are barely
delivered with any emotion at all. And Duhamel seems unsure whether to play Don
Andrès as genuinely smitten and lovestruck after meeting La Périchole or as a
standard stage villain with no motivation but evil designs on a woman’s virtue.
Nothing in Minkowski’s conducting helps pull these characters into a realm
beyond caricature – but what makes La
Périchole so special is that in both its versions (1868 and 1874) the
characters rise well above the cardboard clownishness of protagonists in
earlier Offenbach works and become real human beings in a genuine (if
exaggerated) predicament.
Minkowski conducts all the interactions
among the principals with his usual outstanding sure-handedness and understanding
of the music, and his overall pacing for the entire work is first-rate. Orchestra
and chorus are excellent, and all the singing itself is very fine: certainly
everyone involved learned how to put the arias and ensembles across and how to
project them with a basic level of emotional involvement. But Minkowski,
elsewhere in Offenbach, has extracted much more than that. Why he does not do
so here may be a function of the quality of the cast or may have something to
do with the overall Bordeaux production – but in either case, this is a very
solid performance that could have been considerably more convincing.
Strictly musical matters add to the
frustration. Minkowski has an admirable habit of studying multiple versions of
stage works, when they exist, and putting together hybrid forms that partake of
the best parts of several of them. Offenbach himself would have approved: he
was very much in tune with changing audience expectations, and had no problem
adding new material or discarding old numbers (even wonderful ones) if he
thought of new ways to please his paying customers. But Minkowski’s decisions
here do not produce a satisfactory hybrid. Although he does pick and choose
material from both versions of La
Périchole, he truncates rather than expands the overall work by dropping
four significant elements from Act III for the purpose, apparently, of
producing a tighter conclusion. But this is a significant mistake. Having
already strangely neglected to provide jingling keys for the song and trio of
the jolly jailer (Don Andrès in disguise), with the result that the many
ringing “tin-tin-tin” lines fall flat, Minkowski then omits material that would
actually show how La Périchole and Piquillo escape from prison; and then he
leaves out, among other things, the scene in which soldiers search for and
eventually find them – which means dropping a particularly nice number, the Chœur des patrouilles. The result is a
speedy dénouement, yes, but also a nearly incoherent one.
The book-style presentation of this
recording, with one CD bound into the front inside cover and the other into the
back inside cover, is superb. The several essays on Offenbach and on La Périchole itself are fascinating. The
inclusion of the complete libretto (for this specific version) is a big plus. And
the illustrations of the covers of multiple sheet-music publications of various
composers’ works based on themes from La
Périchole are a delightful bonus. And, really, La Périchole is a delight, and Minkowski conducts it with knowing
flair. The big problem here is that this La
Périchole could have been so much more than it is – as revelatory as
Minkowski’s versions of other Offenbach works have been. The issue is not what
Minkowski does, which is certainly very fine; it is what he has done elsewhere,
and might have done here, but, for whatever reasons, did not.
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