Philippe Boesmans’ last opera, On purge bébé, premiered at La Monnaie/De Munt in Dember 2022, a few months after the composer’s death. It’s a one act farce to a libretto by Richard Brunel after Feydeau.  Predictably it’s extremely silly and rather French.  It begins with an argument between a porcelain manufacturer (Follavoine) and his wife as they try to discover where Les Isles Hébrides are at the request of their unpleasant and constipated seven year old son.  Looking under “Z” and “E” doesn’t help very much but it serves as a backdrop to their argument about administering a laxative to said son while awaiting the arrival of a fonctionnaire (Chouilloux) charged with sourcing 300,000 unbreakable chamber pots for the French Army.

The revolting child can’t be persuaded to take his medicine despite the fonctionnaire describing his intestinal problems and attempted cures in detail.  And, inevitably the chamber pots are not unbreakable even when the sample is handed over with some reverence to the background of the Grail Music from Parsifal.  Then the fonctionnaire’s wife arrives for lunch with her lover in tow, described as her cousin, but the wife lets slip about the affair and the whole thing concludes with various characters taking the laxative and running off to the lavatory.  And the kid never does find out where the Hebrides are which serves him right.

Musically it’s pretty lively in a through sung sort of way with nothing much in the way of an aria but with a couple of short coloratura bits for the wife.  Performances are fine with excellent French diction throughout.  Baritone Jean-Sébastien Bou and soprano Jodie Devos work well together as the squabbling couple and tenor Denzil Delaere is suitably lagubrious as Chouilloux.  The minor roles are fine too and the La Monnaie Symphony Orchestra plays with panache under the direction of Bassem Akiki.  I don’t think it’s a comic masterpiece but t does have it’s moments.

It’s available as a physical CD, MP3, CD quality and 24bit/48kHz FLAC.  I reviewed from the CD quality digital.  There’s an informative booklet with a fairly detailed synopsis.  There’s also a QR code that can be scanned for the full libretto in French with Flemish translation but no English..

Catalogue number: Fuga Libera FUG818