Felicien David's Lalla Roukh

[edurban]

There will be 2 performances of this 1862 opera, one in Washington, DC at the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater (Jan 26, 2013) and one in NYC at the Rose Theater, Time Warner Center, Columbus Circle (Jan. 31, 2013)  The first is billed as the Modern World Premiere and the company is Opera Lafayette, which I think is a period instrument group.  The Rose theatre is about 15 minutes from my house, so maybe I'll go...

David

[Mark Thomas]

How fascinating to hear an opera by David. I'm fond of Le Désert, but I always think that David's was a rather fragile talent. Still Lalla Rouke was quite famous in its day, so maybe he really was at least a two-hit wonder.

[Alan Howe]

When I hear Le Désert I can't help thinking of a certain Sand Dance...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkhJpr2zR8s

[Mark Thomas]

Ahh, Wilson, Keppel & Betty - imagine doing that for a living for 30+ years! To my mind, though, the music sounded more Scottish than Egyptian. Still, back to David. I was forgetting that some of his chamber music has been recorded and is generally very ingratiating stuff - the string quartets in particular.

[kolaboy]

I wish some enterprising spirit would undertake a resurrection of Spontini's Lalla Roukh. Or Nurmahal, for that matter...

Regardless, nice news about the David work.

[Finn_McCool]

I attended the Washington, DC performance of Lalla Roukh this weekend.   I agree, mostly, with Anne Midgette's review in The Washington Post.  The music in the opera is very nice and it was very well performed and it was very nice to hear it, but all in all it was just pleasant and not earth-shattering.  For all the hype about "orientalism" in this opera, I didn't hear much, if any, Asian influence in the score.  Perhaps that is par for the course for this type of opera.  Two other like-mided operas mentioned in the program, Delibe's Lakme and Bizet's Djamileh, do not have many Asian-sounding themes either.  I guess I was expecting to hear some nod toward the Eastern setting, like in Puccini's Turandot and Madama Butterfly , but this was probably composed too early in the 1800s for that.  The spoken dialogue, while amusing, broke up the flow of the piece for me.  I understand that spoken dialogue was part of the opera-comique productions in the late 1800s, but I'm not a big fan.  There were some really nice arias, including the very first one sung by Marianne Fiset as Lalla Roukh, which had a memorable melody.  I disagreed with Midgette about the singers; I thought they were uniformly good.  Bernard Deletre as Baskir had many great buffa moments.  The dance scenes were outsourced to the the very fine Kalanidhi Dance company and they really added a lot to the show.  The brief choreography for the singers was amusing and well-done.  My minor quibbles were about the intonation in the strings and horns and the lack of any scenery on the stage to better set the scene.  I understand that this opera company, Opera Lafayette, is into "period performance', and I noticed the horns in particular (I am former/occasional horn player) were using old-school horns.  The various crooks needed to be replaced after each phrase since there were no valves on these horns.  I have to say the the horn players did a heroic job.  It is pretty hard to play half steps, let alone at the pace they had to play, on a horn with no valves!  There were some misses, however, and they did mar the atmosphere, briefly.  I don't know if the violins were using some kind of unwieldy older instruments as well, but there were intonation problems that cropped up occasionally.  In the type of small orchestra they had, someone being slightly out of tune is pretty noticeable.  The "set", if you can all it that, consisted solely of a tent in the first act.  I held out hope for maybe a little more set decoration in the second act but, alas, there was only a tent, albeit a different, slightly larger one.  It seemed like it would have been fairly easy to add in a "Persian" rug or something else on the stage to add some color.  The costumes by the New Delhi-based designer Poonam Bhagat were very detailed and colorful, but the chorus wore all black and sang from the back of the stage behind a scrim, not joining the action. With a little more effort in the set design and intonation, this opera could be the nice little cream puff that it probably was 100 years ago.  As it was on Saturday, it was an enjoyable evening out with my girlfriend.  We both liked the show and she even ran into a guy she knows who told us his wife was one of the dancers!   

[JimL]

Nice to have a man-on-scene!  Welcome aboard, Finn!

[Richergar]

The real significance of this opera is that is was a show-piece for virtually every soprano for decades. If you look at the bios of many singers, their debuts or 'great moments' are often marked by performances of the work. David's music seems increasingly recorded, but there's not been a recording of this, or a performance, to my knowledge, and that's where the interest really lies. All best

[scottevan]

I was at the performance at Lincoln Center's Rose Theater in Manhattan last night. Though the story is slight, Felicien David's music is pleasing and melodic without being memorable. His orchestration is masterful, sounding Eastern without being imitative. The singers, especially Marianne Fiset as the title character and Nathalie Paulin as her confidante Mizra, were exceptional. Conductor Ryan Brown and the Opera Lafayette orchestra made as persuasive a case as one could make for this score. At first I was put off by the sight of the chorus sitting in boxes at the rear of the stage, but in light of the direction, this made perfect sense. The onstage "chorus," in this case, were classical Indian dancers. Their movements were not only beautiful to watch but really helped to ground the story in India, rather than some hazy idea of the East as this music and so much of 19th century French music tends to do.

Saint-Seans, Bizet, as well as lesser known composers like David were fascinated by the exotic sounds of the East but absorbed the themes and styles of that music through their cultural filters. Adding the visual component of true Indian dance performed by classically trained dancers helped to remove that veil of cultural distance, and created an exotic world that did not require sets or scenery. This all came together in what was, for me, the highlight of the performance: while the the tenor sang a beautiful Barcarolle offstage, a solo dancer gave a visual interpretation of his song through subtle hand gestures and exquisite movements. As I tell friends who are opera-resistant, it's moments like these, when music, singing, words and story all combine into a perfect whole, that make opera the jaw-dropping art that it is.

The same forces recorded "Lalla Roukh" during this limited engagement, and I believe it will be released in 2014 by Naxos. Maybe one day we'll get a complete recording of David's other stage "hit" La Perle du Brasil   Here's hoping...

[Alan Howe]

Fascinating. Thanks!

[Richergar]

A couple of more things on the opera.

First, someone asked about the Spontini. That was done a few years ago in Potsdam, and there's a single cd available, which I can dig up if need be.

I thought the performance at Lincoln Center was remarkable. I do wonder if the extended dance sequences will make it on the the Naxos recording, or whether the temptation will be do to this as a single cd. I'd hope the former, because I think part of the sense of seeing the whole opera is a certain kind of atmospheric continuity. It was an opera comique, so you also have the dialogue as necessary, and again I am not sure how much of that will make it in.

I thought the interesting thing about it - one of them - was that in Act II you get the obvious prefigurement of the great soprano-mezzo duet from Lakme. Again, remember, this was a VERY popular work for a generation or more. I knew that singers (sopranos) had had it as a very common debut vehicle, and I wasn't sure why, but in hearing the whole thing it's clear - it is a lovely part but not terribly exposed or taxing in the upper register or with a lot of coloratura. In fact, the mezzo (or short soprano if you want) in the second role could arguably be said to have the larger presence in Act I. Much depends on the charm and physical allure of the soprano and while you can score nicely with the role, the opera really doesn't fall on your shoulders, and not for that matter on anyone's. Parts are nicely distributed and depending on how someone would want to stage it, the buffa element with the bass (who was excellent here) could predominate. I thought the singing was all good or better, although to my ears the soprano had a tendency at times to sign very slightly flat. Fine work from everyone else, and lovely choreography, given the current state of opera choreography <g>. What was lovely  (after hearing so much at the MET) was to hear so much good French.

[kolaboy]

...someone asked about the Spontini. That was done a few years ago in Potsdam, and there's a single cd available, which I can dig up if need be...

Oh, do please dig (if it's deemed appropriate by the admins, that is)

[Mark Thomas]

Much as I'd like to hear something from Lalla Roukh myself, I'm afraid that our policy is not to allow rips form CDs to be available at UC.

[kolaboy]

Ah, didn't realize it was an officially released cd...

[Mark Thomas]

And I didn't realise that it wasn't! If it's a private recording which is being circulated, and you have permission to provide a link or to upload the tracks, then do so by all means.