French tenor Cyrille Dubois has collected some of the better known Britten works “en français” for this recording. One normally hears these works performed by English singers in what is pretty much an “official” Britten style so I was intrigued to hear them interpreted by a native French speaker, albeit one with a track record of performing Britten’s operas, song cycles and choral works!
The first piece is the early Quatre chansons françaises, performed with orchestra in this case the Orchestre national de Metz Grand Est with David Reiland conducting. The singing here is quite stylish and distinctly French; perhaps a little more emphatic than one is accustomed too but it works. The orchestra copes admirably with the dense and colourful orchestral writing. It includes Paul Verlaine’s “Chanson d’automne” with the famous opening “Les sanglots longs des violins” though in 1928 the composer could not have known the significance that line would assume later.
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Lili Elbe; music by Tobias Picker, libretto by Aryeh Lev Stollman, is an opera set in the late 1920s. The essence of the plot is the surgical transitioning from male to female of the Danish painter Einar Wegener to become Lili Elbe. It’s the first instance historically of such a transition and it deals, inter alia, with issues of identity and acceptance that still resonate today. 
Intelligence; music by Jake Heggie, libretto by Gene Scheer, is, on the face of it, a spy thriller. We are in Richmond in 1865 and Union forces are closing in on the Southern capital. Elizabeth Van Lew is a wealthy spinster who is spying for the North. She infiltrates her enslaved woman Mary Jane Bowser into the Jefferson Davis household but Mary Jane is not what she appears. She is highly intelligent, literate and has a photographic memory. No-one will think to hide sensitive information from a, presumed illiterate, slave. The relationship between the two women is complex. Mary Jane was born in Elizabeth’s father’s home but was baptised in the white church and educated in the north. She has been told that her mother died in childbirth. But all is not as it seems.
The season starts to ramp up a bit…
operaramblings 