Recordings of Offenbach's 1868 operetta La Périchole, here performed in an 1873 revision, have been rather uncommon. True, it doesn't contain any of the big Offenbach hits, and its Peruvian setting, with a variety of Spanish dances and chinoiserie standing in for whatever music might have been heard in colonial Peru, seems increasingly preposterous as time goes on. However, verisimilitude has never been a requirement in operetta, and this story of the titular street singer (who was an actual historical individual) pursued by a sleazy colonial administrator hits a lot of the bases. Anglophone listeners will note that Arthur Sullivan surely knew this music inside and out, and replicated the combination of limpid songs for the heroine and quite a few sharp narrative choruses. This production, recorded live in 2018 at the Festival Radio France Occitanie in Montpellier, is nothing fancy, but that is its charm. La Périchole is nicely sung by a mezzo-soprano with the delightful name of Aude Extrémo, who resists the temptation to ham it up (sample her drunk scene, "Ah, quel diner je viens de faire") and inhabits the role well. The large cast is consistent, and conductor Marc Minkowski and Les Musiciens du Louvre, far from their Baroque origins, keep things moving in a lively way. One gets the sense that Offenbach would have been fully satisfied, and the recording is a must for any operetta fan.© TiVo

Cinq-Mars is an 1877 opera by Charles Gounod, written a dozen years after his last big hit, Roméo et Juliette. It's based on a historical novel by Alfred de Vigny about the Marquis of Cinq-Mars, a nobleman who attempted to rally resistance to Cardinal Richelieu and in 1642 was executed for his pains. The work harks back to the tradition of French grand opera and was never very successful. It fell into a series of numbers at a time when audiences were getting a taste of a different way of doing things, not just from Germany, but from Verdi also. But it does contain numbers that show Gounod's undiminished melodic gift: sample the "Cavatine" of the Princess Marie Gonzaga, the linchpin of the wholly fictitious romantic subplot added by Gounod and his librettists. Marie is sung by Véronique Gens, who leads a cast of uniformly strong singers, and this live performance, with the Munich Radio Orchestra and Bavarian Radio Choir under the direction of Ulf Schirmer, has plenty of energy. The recording is available in a sumptuous hardback package with beautiful classic design; the event may not live up to the presentation, but the idea, as a counterweight to the instant reproducibility of art in the Internet age, is a good one.© TiVo

Located in Venice’s Palazzetto Bru Zane, the Centre de Musique Romantique Française (Centre for French Romantic Music) continues in its pursuit of publishing unknown French music with the very same dynamism it’s displayed since its conception. This particular excavation was performed in Budapest by the Purcell Choir and the Orfeo Orchestra, conducted by György Vashegyi. The cathedral-sized concert hall in which it was recorded has exceptional acoustics and gives this discovery a wonderful sense of space and openness. While the protagonists of this opera Phèdre (Phaedra) may be familiar to us – Phaedra, Hippolytus, Theseus and Ono, its composer is much less well-known. The opera may have been shunned by Berlioz sixty years after it was written but Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne nevertheless scored a veritable triumph in 1786 when it was sung at the Opera (Royal Academy of Music) by the best singers of the time. Especially when it’s compared to Gluck’s masterpieces, this opera deserves to come out of hiding due to its undeniable melodic and theatrical qualities. Born in the Dordogne, Lemoyne studied in Berlin before becoming second music master to Frederick the Great, King of Prussia and patron of the arts. Upon his return to France, he had to contend with the rivalry of the Parisian public between the Gluckists and the Piccinnists, whose notorious feud had not yet come to an end. Phèdre was one of the great successes of the old social and political order in France before the French revolution and even survived up until the beginning of the 19th century, before it fell by the wayside and was seemingly forgotten about. Leading one of the few Hungarian ensembles devoted to early music on period instruments, the spirited Francophile György Vashegyi captures the dramatic intensity of this score brilliantly with an outstanding quartet of international soloists who breathe life back into this opera. © François Hudry/Qobuz

Handel's Alcina, a work in the vocally virtuosic opera seria genre from 1735, returned to opera stages after a revival by Joan Sutherland in 1960, but recordings of it are not abundant. This is partly because it is a very visual work, with dances and sorcery special effects that don't come through on a recording. Another reason is that it contains some of Handel's most strenuous vocal writing, requiring a trio of top-notch female singers. The latter problem is solved in this 2024 release by Les Musiciens du Louvre and its director Marc Minkowski, who keep the massive, three-and-a-quarter-hour spectacle moving with tough, resolute playing. The title role is sung by mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená (Lady Rattle for peerage freaks), a Handel specialist of long standing who has absolutely outdone herself here in one of the big Handel roles that exploits her entire range, both physically and emotionally. The love-triangle (or rectangle) plot, however, requires other singers who can stand up to the star, and this the opera receives in Erin Morley as Alcina's sister, Morgana, and Elizabeth DeShong as Bradamente, a fiancée disguised as her own brother. Though the plot is over-intricate, the emotional threads remain clear in this performance, and the engineering from PentaTone Classics is top-notch. This release made classical best-seller charts in early 2024, something not often accomplished by hefty Handel opera recordings.© James Manheim /TiVo

Everyone thinks that they know Alceste by Lully, and yet this 1674 masterpiece has almost never been recorded in its entirety. Apart from the Malgoire version from 1975 with Bruce Brewer and Felicity Palmer, which is starting to become outdated, the real treat is a second versoin by the same Malgoire twenty years later with Jean-Philippe Lafont and Colette Alliot-Lugaz... And so we can only take our hats off to the new discographical opus from Christophe Rousset's Talens Lyriques, a lively and elegant reading which allows us to rediscover everything that was so innovative about this brilliant, effervescent Florentine, who would become a typical Versaillais, a courtesan and a wheeler-dealer. King Louis XIV - 36 years old, still with all his own teeth and a victorious war leader - could only feel flattered by the piece signed by Quinault: Alcide, who covets the beautiful Alceste (who has been promised to Admetus), is none other than Hercules himself - Louis XIV seeing himself in Hercules saving the beautiful Madame de Montespan from the clutches of her husband. To be sure, in this opera, Admetus/Hercules magnanimously hands Alceste, whom he has saved from hell, to her husband, while the poor Mr Montespan would end his career and his life exiled in Gascony... Honour intact. The Sun King loved the work, to the point that he commanded that rehearsals be held at Versailles. According to Madame de Sévigné, "The King declared that if he found himself in Paris when it was performed, he would go to see it every night." That being said, if Alceste suited the tastes of the court, it didn't do so well in Paris, where Lully's enemies, jealous of the extravagant privileges that he had won (the exclusive right to "have sung any whole piece in France, wither in French verse or in other languages, without the written permission of said Sir Lully, on pain of a ten thousand livre fine, and confiscation of theatres, equipment, decorations, costumes..."), heaped plot upon plot, while the gallant Mercury sang his little couplet: Dieu !  Le bel opéra ! Rien de plus pitoyable ! Cerbère y vient japper d'un aboi lamentable !  Oh ! Quelle musique de chien ! Oh ! Quelle musique du diable ! [Lord!/Fine opera!/There's nothing so pitiable!/Cerberus is yapping, his howls lamentable!/What doggish music!/What devilish music!]. Posterity would decide otherwise, and Rousset proved it triumphantly. © SM/Qobuz

The composer Egidio Duni is all but unknown nowadays, but he worked amidst several important currents of 18th century musical life. A Neapolitan who wrote Italian operas, he was backed by a noble patron who apparently gave him the means to move to Paris. Duni composed French operas of various types, and Denis Diderot cited him as a counterexample to Rousseau's contention that the French language was unsuited to opera. Duni would be worth hearing for his influence alone; the two short comic works recorded here were important early examples of opéra-comique, but they are also charming in their own right. In Paris, they were known not as operas but as "comédies melées d'ariettes," or comedies mixed with ariettas. Much of the dialogue is spoken, and some of that is unaccompanied, while other pieces have a light continuo-like backing. (This aspect of the notation has not survived, but the decisions made by the performers here are unobjectionable.) The texts hold up even today as pretty funny. Le peintre amoureux de son modèle ("The Painter in Love with His Model," she chooses someone her own age at the end) and Les deux chasseurs et la laitière ("The Two Hunters and the Milkmaid") have crackling sitcom dialogue. Physical album buyers will get a booklet with complete texts. The singers are not spectacular (four in one opera, three in the other), but then, they shouldn't be; what is important is that they put the text across, don't overact, and engage with the comedy. The small Orkester Nord is the right size at 23 players, and conductor Martin Wåhlberg keeps things moving along. This is a delightful release of much more than historical interest. If scores are available, collegiate groups could easily mount productions of these works.© James Manheim /TiVo

The paladins, as video game aficionados know, were knights of Charlemagne's court, French counterparts to the Knights of the Round Table. In Rameau's opera, they are the basis for a broad medieval spoof that came down in bits and pieces from Ariosto through various hands, some of them unknown. Here, it receives a valuable new recording from rising young Baroque opera conductor Valentin Tournet and his vocal-orchestral group La Chapelle Harmonique. The opera, which Rameau called a tragédie lyrique, isn't quite in Monty Python territory, but at times, for instance, with the unmotivated entrance of a troupe of Chinese entertainers during a magical episode in the third act, things approach that. This was Rameau's last publicly performed opera, premiered when he was in his late 70s, and it was an uncharacteristic flop. Perhaps it was the overloaded nature of the whole thing, or perhaps the new stylistic breezes blowing in from Italy. It is, however, highly entertaining and loaded with good dance tunes and colorful orchestration. There are few recitatives, and those that do exist are tightly intertwined with the action and keep things moving. There are just a few recordings of this opera, and this one, with a sumptuous booklet and an appendix of material cut by Rameau, may emerge as the standard. It is beautifully recorded at the Palace of Versailles and conveys the scope an 18th century opera production would have had. Tournet has a strong cast, led by Sandrine Piau as the romantic lead Argie, in love with one of the Paladins but pursued as well by her guardian. (She moves over from the role of Argie's friend Nérine in one of the few earlier recordings of the work by conductor William Christie.) The various comic and dance elements come through vividly. This is a strong recording that will fill a lot of holes in Rameau collections. © TiVo

The musical world owes a debt of gratitude to French conductor Christophe Rousset not only for the vital, exquisite performances he delivers with the ensembles Les Talens Lyriques and Choeur de Chambre de Namur, but for his work in bringing to light neglected masterpieces of Baroque opera. Lully's Bellérophon, premiered in 1679, was a huge success in its time, with an initial run of nine months. Part of its popularity was doubtless due to the parallels that could be drawn between its plot and certain recent exploits of Louis XV, but even the earliest critics recognized the score's uniqueness and exceptional quality within Lully's oeuvre, so it's perhaps surprising that it has never been recorded before. The distinctiveness of the music was likely a result at least in part of the fact that Lully's preferred librettist Philippe Quinault was out of favor at the court of Louis XV at the time, so the composer turned to Thomas Corneille for the libretto, and Corneille's literary and dramatic styles were so different from Quinault's that Lully was nudged out of his comfort zone and had to develop new solutions to questions of structure and the marrying of music to text. It is the first opera for which Lully composed fully accompanied recitatives, and that alone gives it a textural richness that surpasses his earlier works. The composer also allows soloists to sing together, something that was still a rarity in Baroque opera. There are several duets and larger ensembles; the love duet, "Que tout parle à l'envie de notre amour extreme!," is a ravishing expression of passion and happiness, as rhapsodic as anything in 19th century Italian opera. The level of musical inventiveness throughout is exceptional even for Lully; the expressiveness of the recitatives, the charm of the instrumental interludes, the originality of the choruses, and the limpid loveliness of the airs make this an opera that demands attention. Rousset and his forces give an outstanding performance that's exuberantly spirited, musically polished, rhythmically springy, and charged with dramatic urgency. The soloists are consistently of the highest order. Cyril Auvity brings a large, virile, passionate tenor to the title role and Céline Scheen is warmly lyrical as his lover Philonoë. Ingrid Perruche is fiercely powerful as the villain, Stéenobée, and Jean Teitgen is a secure, authoritative Apollo. Soloists, chorus, and orchestra are fluent in the subtle inflections of French middle Baroque ornamentation. The sound of the live recording is very fine, with a clean, immediate, realistic ambience. This is a release that fans of Baroque opera will not want to miss. Highly recommended. © TiVo