Sabine Devieilhe impresses in Stravinsky’s Le Rossignol

Olivier Py directed a production of Stravinsky’s Le Rossignol at the Théâtre des Champs Élysées in 2023 and a live recording was made for CD.  The Nightingale is sung by soprano Sabine Devieilhe and she is very good indeed.  She has pretty much the perfect voice for this role with its coloratura sections and very high tessitura.  Her voice sounds suitably sweet all the way up and her coloratura is very precise.  She’s very well backed up by an all French cast featuring the excellent tenor Cyrille Dubois as the Fisherman and the unmistakable Laurent Naouri as the Chamberlain.  Jean-Sébastien Bou also impresses as a suitably tremulous Emperor and there’s a nice cameo from Chantal Santon Jeffery as the Cook.  The minor roles are all well sung and French diction is notably good across the board. Continue reading

Words (almost) fail me

If I had been languishing in obscurity for 250 years like Joseph Bodin de Boismortier I think I’d rather stay that way than be rescued by Hervé Niquet and the French “comedy” duo Dino and Shirley (Corinne and Gilles Benizio).  To be fair their take on Boismortier’s 1743 ballet-comédie Don Quichotte chez la duchesse isn’t nearly as bad as their previous brutal murder of Purcell’s King Arthur but it’s really weird and patchy.  It’s rather hard to describe in fact.  It’s a sort of mash up of farce, commedia, slapstick and pastiche in which bits of baroque opera occasionally break out.  It’s also staged as meta theatre with the stage interacting with the pit and Niquet himself ending up in the action.

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