One might be forgiven for thinking that French operetta ended with Offenbach since, outside of France anyway, nothing much gets performed.  However, the tradition continued.  Reynaldo Hahn, for example, produced Ciboulette in 1923.  Another has now come my way.  It’s an audio recording of Andrê Messager’s 1928 work Coups de roulis.

It’s set on a French battleship, the Montesquieu in the Mediterranean.  Christmas leave has been cancelled to allow the visit of the High Commissioner M. Puy-Pradal on a cost saving expedition.  He is accompanied by his daughter Béatrice who is his secretary.  Both the ship’s captain Gerville and a young officer Kermao fall in love with Béatrice. During a party given during a courtesy visit to Egypt Puy-Pradal forms a liaison with the aspiring actress Sola Myrrhis who believes Puy-Pradal’s influence can get her into the Comédie-Française. He accompanies her on her Egyptian tour.

Meanwhile Béatrice has fallen in love with Kermao but her father wants her to marry Gerville.  On their return to the ship Puy-Pradal catches Kermao with Sola Myrrhis and breaks off the relationship.  Béatrice is also pretty pissed off but Gerville intervenes.  The young lovers are reconciled, Sola Myrhhis joins the Comédie-Française but Puy-Pradal loses his job in a cabinet reshuffle.

The music is very light; bordering on cabaret style, but with rollicking choruses.  Everything about the show oozes Frenchness.  It was given at the Théâtre de l’Athénée in Paris in 2023 in a production by Les Frivolités Parisiennes,  This was recorded live.  That said I’m not sure that what’s on the recording is exactly what was seen/heard in the house.  In the recording all the minor characters and what I imagine would normally be quite a lot of spoken dialogue between numbers are omitted.  Instead there’s a rather arch spoken narration that carries the plot with just the five principal characters, the orchestra and the chorus represented musically.

Clarice Dalles sings Béatrice.  She’s listed in the booklet as a contralto but she’s clearly a soprano with a rather nice, bright young sounding voice; as one would expect for such a role.  By contrast, Irina de Baguy, who sings Sola Myrrhis, has a much darker timbre.  The men are all baritones with Jean-Baptiste Dumora, as Puy-Pradal, and Philippe Brocard, as Gerville, sounding quite mature in contrast to the more youthful sound oif Christophe Gay as Kermao.  The chorus and orchestra are properly exuberant and conductor Alexandra Cravero keeping things moving along briskly.

The recording is really clear and easy to listen to.  It’s released as a 2CD set, MP3 and in the usual digital formats at CD standard and 96kHz/24 bit resolution.  I listened to the hi-res version.  There’s a booklet with texts and translations of the musical numbers but not the linking narrative, so if your French isn’t too hot you may be struggling.

All in all it’s a reasonably amusing and utterly frivolous romp.

Catalogue information: b-records LBM067