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The elegant Jodie Devos puts her talents to work in service of a fairly unknown known side of Offenbach, taking on several somewhat-forgotten pieces which call for very specific voices, known in Offenbach’s day by names such as "chanteuse d’agilité", "chanteuse à roulade" or "première chanteuse légère". Of course, everyone knows the tune of the doll Olympia from Tales of Hoffmann, or the telling of the death of Eurydice in Orpheus in the Underworld, but the substantial repertoire of the composer's smaller pieces (which he generally referred to as "operettas" to distinguish them from his larger works, his famous opéras bouffe) contains a number of virtuoso arias for coloratura soprano. In them, we hear the vocal imitation of the jeu perlé piano technique or of Paganini's "flying staccato", in which unstinting bravura hides the real difficulty behind something apparently easy. But the difference from many bel canto composers, who merely show off vocals and melody, is that Offenbach knows how to charge these things with emotion, with textual significance, with personality, and with contrasts: simple mechanics never take precedence over diversity. This record allows us to discover a neat little collection of sadly little-known works which are well overdue a return to the French stage. © SM/Qobuz

One could scoff, of course... One of the masterpieces of Offenbach's opéra bouffe, recorded... in English? But that would be to forget that almost no recordings of the work exist, and that in the year following the début of his 1869 work L’Ile de Tulipatan, it was performed in German in Berlin and Vienna, and two years later in England (under the title Kissi-Kissi... Don't ask why). In other words, it would be a rather poor show to mock the release of The Island of Tulipatan sung in English, by the Light Opera of New York. One might also note that, played and sung in this way (and spoken, as the dialogues are also performed in English), we are getting a devilishly good idea of what you might have seen on stage in London, Manchester or Melbourne in the 1870s, with a rather modestly-sized orchestra of rather modest quality, "normal" singers (i.e. no Wagnerians), but all gifted with an infectious enthusiasm. But in any case, they've gone and done it, and we are still waiting for a French company of similar standing to allow us to enjoy the hilarious adventures of Cacatois XXII, Octogène Romboïdal and their transgendered offspring. So there! © Qobuz