Georges Bizet. Portraits. Hardcover book plus 4 CDs. Bru Zane (BZ 1059). Total time: 305 minutes.
DIGITAL REVIEW — The ever-amazing scholars and publishers at the Center for French Romantic Music (located in Venice, Italy) have now released the sixth in their Portraits series of multi-disc volumes, each devoted to surveying works in several genres by a single composer, and each accompanied by a small hardback book.
The new Portraits package brings us five hours of works by Georges Bizet that are mostly unknown to music lovers and, indeed, performers. The longest work here is Djamileh, an enchanting one-act opera that reached the stage scarcely three years before the first performance of Carmen and the composer’s subsequent death when he was only 36. The work had few performances during his lifetime but later won much praise from Gustav Mahler (who conducted it in Hamburg and Vienna) and Richard Strauss. The best of the previous recordings, no doubt, is the one featuring the silver-toned Slovakian-born soprano Lucia Popp (conducted by Lamberto Gardelli).
Bizet is justly renowned for his final opera, Carmen, as well as his early Symphony in C, various other orchestral works (including music written for the play L’Arlésienne, the complete performance of which includes chorus as well, plus passages for the orchestra to play under onstage action and spoken dialogue), his opera The Pearl Fishers (from 1863, when he was a mere 24 years old), and a miraculous set of pieces for piano four-hands (Jeux d’enfants).
This new recording of Djamileh easily matches the Gardelli in many respects, not least because the singers are all native (or at least highly accomplished) French speakers. This allows them to handle expertly the spoken dialogue, here rendered complete (the dialogues are given track numbers, so are easy to skip if one prefers). Some moments in the work suddenly make more sense to me, now that I know certain of these spoken interchanges.
I was particularly drawn in by the slender-toned but artful tenor Sahy Ratia, who was born in Madagascar and relocated to France early in his career. The orchestral accompaniment has surely never been handled with more finesse than shown here by Les Siècles, a period-instrument ensemble under the alert and flexible leadership of François-Xavier Roth. A solo-trombone countermelody in the prelude, for example, is managed with great elegance and subtlety.
Two objections: Djamileh’s “Lamento” is taken far too slowly, milking the Tristan-like harmonies (which I don’t inherently mind) but putting Isabelle Druet’s otherwise fine voice under unnecessary stress; and Philippe-Nicolas Martin, though excellent in spoken dialogue, cannot produce a fully steady tone in his short but crucial “couplets” (“Il faut pour éteindre ma fièvre”) as Jean-Philippe Lafont almost casually does on the Gardelli recording.
(For true opera buffs, I should mention that other recordings of Djamileh offer their own insights: one with Marie-Ange Todorovich, Jean-Luc Maurette, and the renowned baritone Françoix le Roux; another, made in Poland, with the rich-toned American mezzo-soprano Jennifer Feinstein; and a Soviet-era one sung in Russian. And there are currently no fewer than three very effective video versions on YouTube, in, respectively, French, English, and — my favorite, because of the very fine interaction between the singers — Hungarian.)
This four-CD “Portrait” set also allows us to hear two dramatic cantatas (more or less operatic scenes) that Bizet wrote for the Prix de Rome competitions: one, Le Retour de Virginie, possibly as early as 1853 (this recording is the work’s world premiere), the other, Clovis et Clotilde, in 1857. (Another Prix de Rome cantata survives: David, 1856. It has been performed recently in Paris, but no recording exists yet.)
The 1857 Clovis et Clotilde finally won Bizet the prize, with the result that he got to spend the next few years in Italy steeping himself in Italian opera and the treasures of Italian art museums (as reported in letters that he wrote to his family and that have been wonderfully translated, with commentary, in a book by Hugh Macdonald). Both of these cantatas show how completely and successfully this teenaged composer had mastered a wide range of styles and manners typical of the music of the era: They often lack a personal stamp but could easily be taken for previous unknown excerpts from works of Meyerbeer or Gounod.
In addition, we are treated to some piano works, including the Variations chromatiques (1868), whose harmonic explorations I find a gratifying challenge a century and a half later. Also, there are 15 songs (including one perennial favorite in exotic manner: “Adieux de la hôtesse arabe”), an intriguing if oddly shaped Overture in A minor (almost a mini-symphony, apparently composed 1855-57), and four widely varying choral pieces with orchestra, including a delightful one in siciliano rhythm (“La Golfe de Baïa”) and another, “La mort s’avance,” that is a highly creative “meditation” (Bizet’s own word, in the subtitle) on two Chopin etudes.
More importantly, the cantatas help us understand how The Pearl Fishers, though written only a few years later (something we tend to forget, somehow assuming that it closely preceded Carmen), is as vivid as it is. Bizet was born, it seems, to bring fascinating characters and their dramatic interactions to life on the concert or operatic stage. (A 1988 live Clovis performance, featuring no less than Montserrat Caballé, is on YouTube.)
As a gesture to the immense amount of work Bizet did across his career in order to bring in some cash, transcribing for piano (or piano and voice) other people’s works, we get to hear his colorful transcriptions for piano solo of six highly diverse choruses from Gounod operas, including Faust and Mireille.
The biggest surprise, for me, was a nearly half-hour-long work called Vasco de Gama. (Bizet uses de rather than da.) This work is an “ode-symphonie,” a genre that was inaugurated in 1844 by Félicien David with his instantly beloved Le Désert. The term “ode-symphonie” refers to a highly descriptive concert work (no costumes, sets, or onstage motion) for voices, orchestra, and narrator, although the spoken narration in Bizet’s work is very brief.
Bizet wrote Vasco de Gama when he was only 21 and still in Rome at the Villa Medici. The work portrays the beginning of the famous Portuguese explorer’s momentous trip around the African continent. In the course of six movements, the mariners cast off; a storm kicks up, personified by the god Adamastor; the storm eventually calms down; and the whole crew express excitement when they sight land (“Asia!” they shout) and prepare to get off the ship in order to conquer the “heathen.” Bizet intended to complete the work with two further sections but gave up the attempt; he brought the completed Part 1 to performance in 1863, and it eventually appeared in print five years after his death, but no performances followed until the present performers took up the honorable (and pleasant) task.
Other movements in this work are matched to music no less vivid, and, as so often with Bizet (even at age 21), they are superbly orchestrated. I found particularly stirring the prayer that Vasco and the other sailors (his brother Alvaro, the young Léonard, and male chorus) sing, begging God’s protection during a seastorm. This movement could easily have found a place in one of Bizet’s operas, and I was thrilled to get to know it, and in such a confident and communicative performance.
One movement in Vasco de Gama will be familiar to many lovers of song: the bolero sung by the ship’s mate Léonard (a role written for, and sung here by, a mezzo-soprano), beginning with the words “La marguerite a fermé sa corolle.” You may know it better by the title under which it was published separately, without a part for chorus: “Ouvre ton coeur.” Bizet also inserted it (with some altered words) into his important opera Ivan IV, a work that never reached performance in his lifetime but now exists in an eminently practical edition by the aforementioned Hugh Macdonald. The song, of course, also seems to announce, 15 years in advance, the style that Bizet would explore so fascinatingly in Carmen. Indeed, no doubt because the song was unpublished, he felt free to reuse the vocalist’s final scalar ascent almost note-for-note at the end of Carmen’s seductive Act 1 “Séguedille.”
The performers on this 4-CD set (in addition to the three who take the leading roles in Djamileh, already mentioned) include some of France and Belgium’s most distinguished, such as singers Karina Gauvin, Mélissa Petit (utterly entrancing), Cyrille Dubois (a light tenor perfectly cast in exquisite music here), and Thomas Dolié, and pianists Célia Oneto Bensaid, Anthony Romaniuk, Florian Caroubi, and, in the Gounod choruses and two solo pieces, Nathanaël Gouin. Tenor Reinoud Van Mechelen, a sensitive artist heard in eight songs, sounds vocally less secure than he does on recordings of Baroque operas. Sometimes he doesn’t land squarely on a note; other times his vibrato threatens to become a wobble, especially in La Nuit (where it is exacerbated by an unnecessarily slow tempo).
The fine orchestras and conductors include, besides Roth and his marvelous band, ones from Lyon (conducted by Ben Glassberg) and Metz (David Reiland), plus the period-instrument ensemble Le Concert de la Loge (Julien Chauvin). In each orchestra we are treated to some marvelous instrumental soloists, whether a glittering harp or a wonderfully flitting flute. In various of the works, the Flemish Radio Choir sings magnificently, as does the chorus of Lille Opera.
The book includes informative essays and all the sung texts in French and in good English translations. I’d have liked the texts for the six Gounod choruses. They would have helped me hear what was being sung about — and, as I caught on to the melody, would have allowed me to start singing along.
The only other thing that is missing is specific discussion of certain of the pieces included. For that, I strongly recommend Hugh Macdonald’s irreplaceable 2014 Bizet, in Oxford University Press’ renowned The Master Musicians series. Macdonald’s superb thematic catalogue of the works of Bizet is available online and gives further details. And, if your French is up to it, I strongly recommend dipping into Hervé Lacombe’s marvelously rich 864-page book published by Fayard in 2000: Georges Bizet: Naissance d’une identité créatrice.
