The story of
Coppélia encompasses varying
degrees of broad comedy, romance and pathos and is illustrated
by a sparkling
score full of foot-tapping tunes that will be instantly familiar
to anyone who ever heard the long-running BBC radio programme
Your
hundred best tunes.
Sylvia, on the other hand, with
its characters drawn pretty randomly from Greek myth and the
composer’s imagination, is considerably darker and richer
in both its theme and its music. No less a contemporary than
Tchaikovsky was a huge admirer of Delibes’ scores and,
in composing his own ballets, regarded the Frenchman as something
of a model.
Balletomanes have been lucky in recent years to see a wealth
of performances - newly filmed or re-emerging from archives -
appearing on DVD. There is still, though, a market for ballet
music recorded on CD and, if you are listening in the car, on
a plane or on the beach - with headphones, please! - I can think
of no more enjoyable versions of Delibes’s imaginative
and inventive scores than those currently under review.
Jean-Baptiste Mari, an Algerian-born protégé of
Charles Munch, presents us with accounts that clearly derive
from the theatre and, not surprisingly, the Orchestre du Théâtre
National de L’Opéra de Paris is at one with him
on that. Tempi are all carefully chosen to suit the practicalities
of real-life performances - as Delibes himself would obviously
have intended them to be - and generally eschew vulgar crowd-pleasing
effects. That, coupled with the frequently quite dark sonorities
produced by the orchestra, may at times make for a less exciting
individual number or two, but the overall result is that
Coppélia and
Sylvia emerge
as far more musically impressive than is often the case. That
is not to say, however, that the innate lyricism of the scores
is lost: Mari consistently coaxes exquisitely beautiful playing
from the superbly balanced orchestra and often reveals, as a
result, felicitous detail than has frequently been obscured -
or lost altogether - in other performances.
Given that the same conductor, orchestra, recording venue, producer
(Gréco Casadesus) and balance engineer (Paul Vavasseur)
were involved in both recordings, it is not surprising that both
Delibes ballets, even allowing for their differing overall tones,
emerge with equal success. These beautifully-recorded accounts
displace virtually all others to go straight to the top of the
tree.
I only wish that I could be as fully enthusiastic about the (quite
substantial) fillers but, in reality, they are a distinctly mixed
bag. The best is the Act 2 music from
La Source, a hybrid
ballet by Delibes (who composed the music for that Act in full,
as well as the first scene of Act 3) and Minkus (responsible
for Act 1 and the second scene of Act 3). Mackerras and his Covent
Garden players sound as if they are enjoying themselves immensely,
with lots of felicitous and affectionate touches demonstrated
throughout.
Lanchberry seems less involved in the
Paquita pas de dix,
however, and fails to characterise much of it effectively. This
is - rather surprisingly, given the conductor’s background
- very much a version of the score that has been divorced from
the reality of the requirements of dancers on the stage and emerges,
therefore, as merely a sequence of lightweight, if rather pretty,
tunes.
Even less appealing, though, are the highlights from Minkus’s
Don
Quixote that fill out the second disc of
Coppélia.
Something very odd indeed has happened here. Nayden Todorov’s
account of the full score on Naxos (given a very favourable review
by my colleague
Patrick
Gary here and a generally positive one by
Michael
Cookson here) demonstrated just how rich this music can sound
when treated with respect and given the full “symphonic” treatment.
The latest and best DVD recording of the full ballet, performed
by artists of the Mariinsky Ballet, also reinforces that point
(
see
here). On the disc under review, however, Lanchberry and
his Melbourne orchestra do the music few favours. The performance
is superficial, crudely and sometimes rather vulgarly shaped
and frequently plagued by the addition of unnecessary “cute” little
instrumental flourishes, all seeming to suggest that this is
essentially “light” music. There were times, indeed,
when I thought I was listening to a performance by Herb Alpert’s
Tijuana Brass rather than a professional symphony orchestra.
But Minkus’s reputation has risen considerably in recent
years - especially with the re-emergence of his masterpiece
La
Bayadère into wider currency - and he deserves better
than an account that sounds more suited to an audience in a music
hall rather than in a theatre.
He also deserves, incidentally, greater respect from EMI who
once again manage to get the date of his death wrong by almost
two decades. Minkus did not die in 1890 as their packaging and
booklet notes suggest, but survived in Vienna, in abject poverty
as the First World War hostilities deprived him of his Russian
pension, until 1917 when he was buried in a pauper’s grave,
only to have even that destroyed - and his remains scattered
to the winds - by Nazi thugs after their takeover of Austria
in 1938. May I recommend that those responsible for this consistently
repeated howler add a copy of Robert Letellier’s
The
Ballets of Ludwig Minkus [Cambridge, 2008] to their reference
library?
Rob Maynard
Orchestre du Théâtre National de L’Opéra de Paris/Jean-Baptiste
Mari (Delibes) 
