This is a really interesting and unusual album. French mezzo-soprano Stéphanie d’Oustrac teams up with a small baroque ensemble, Le Poème Harmonique (accordion, theorbo, strings, bassoon/flute) led by Vincent Dumestre to present a selection of music that ranges from traditional songs through 17th century opera/oratorio arias to cabaret music and modern chansons.
The music is grouped into Three “life stages”; Jeunesse, Les vieux airs and Les amours passée; a sort of lifetime of music. I was really excited after the first four numbers because they were touching a whole bunch of things I really love; jazzy cabaret on played freely on baroque instruments, traditional music sounding a bit like a band like Malicorne, a freedom of vocal expression etc. It did quieten down a bit after that with arias by Cavalli and Monteverdi sung in a properly period appropriate way but also other music freely interpreted by all the musicians. It finishes up in a fun way too. There’s a very silly song; Les canards Tyroliens, which features yodelling and coloratura ducks. Then there’s a tango and a plangent rendering of the title track.
Dame Ethel Smyth’s one act opera Der Wald is certainly of some historical interest. It was the first opera by a woman given at the Metropolitan Opera. That was in 1903 and 113 years would pass before the Met did another one; Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de loin in 2016.
Probably pretty much everyone is familiar with Géricault’s painting Le Radeau de la Méduse, depicting scenes of horror after a shipwreck. The story behind it is much less well known. The year is 1816 and a French expedition is off to reoccupy Senegal which had been occupied by the British during the recent wars. The flagship of the expedition is the frigate La Méduse, which carries the governor and his staff and so on. Well ahead of the rest of the flotilla, and out of sight, La Méduse runs aground and is eventually abandoned. The governor, the officers and other nobs take to the boats towing the rest of the crew (154 men and boys) on a hastily improvised raft. Finding progress too slow after 24 hours they cut the raft adrift. When the raft is finally spotted fifteen men are still alive. A fitting allegory for the Bourbon restoration perhaps. 
So, you may ask, what is Opera Ramblings doing reviewing a recording of Rodgers & Hammerstain’s Oklahoma!? Well, it’s a project in the same vein as my reviewing the Bru-Zane recordings of more or less forgotten late 18th and 19th century French operas. It’s an attempt to put the piece in the context of its early performances and also to look at how it was originally performed for, like many early 19th century French operas, if and when Oklahoma! does get performed it’s usually in a style very different from the original The occasion for doing so is a new Chandos recording that attempts to reconstruct the sound of the original 1943 Broadway run. That the recording is very high definition and released in SACD format only increased my interest.
So one of the fun things about this writing project that I started twelve years ago is the unexpected ways that it has sometimes developed. One gets involved with projects, one meets people and one ends up connected with their other projects that may stray some way from, say, opera or art song. So last night I found myself at a film screening and CD release party for the new CD from Hilario Durán and His Latin Jazz Big Band. It was fascinating. First of all I really liked the music; original compositions and covers arranged for something like eighteen brass, woodwind, guitar/bass and percussion players with Hilario conducting from the piano and guests on some of the tracks including the amazing clarinet and sax player Paquito D’Rivera, vocalist/violinist Elizabeth Rodriguez, drummer Horacio “ElNegro” Hernández and bass player Marc Rogers.
This new CD recording of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas sets out to produce a version that might have been heard at court in the early 1680s. This is, of course, one of several theories about the work’s genesis and it’s the one I find most credible. Taking this as a starting point allows music director David Bates a framework in which to consider issues of style and casting.
Centrediscs have recently released a CD of music by Toronto composer Colin Eatock. It’s a mix of choral and orchestral works; most of the former for unaccompanied voices. There are ten works on the disc making a generous 67 minutes or so of music.
One of the strangest records of Kurt Weill’s music that I have ever listened to has just come my way. There are two pieces involved; Propheten and Four Walt Whitman Songs. Propheten has its roots in Weill’s six hour long, Old Testament inspired, opera The Eternal Road which premiered at the Manhattan Opera House in 1937 with a cast of 245 and which ran for 153 performances before, perhaps unsurprisingly, disappearing for a long,long time. Propheten is a 1998 adaptation of the last act by David Drew using the original German text by Franz Werfel plus biblical quotations and additional orchestration by Noam Sheriff. It basically deals with the sack of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar and comes in at a more digestible 45 minutes.
Mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly and pianist Joseph Middleton have produced a CD with three of Mahler’s best known song cycles; the Rückert-Lieder, Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen and the Kindertotenlieder. It’s a very fine recording. Both performers are, of course, expert recitalists and they take quite an individual way with these well known pieces. In general they are quite slow (less so in the Rückert songs than the other two sets) but very clearly articulated. The phrasing, by both singer and pianist, is very deliberate and sometimes quite individual. This is most pronounced in the Rückert songs. It’s an interesting approach which I enjoyed.
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