After the ball

So our three City Lit Opera in Focus classes on Massenet's Cendrillon - it should have been five, but Verdi's Macbeth took more time, which I still think was right - came to an end yesterday. I haven't converted everyone; one of my students still thinks Massenet equals operetta, and that operetta is a bad thing. But the main thing is that I treasure the opera even more for what it is now, with its delicate shifts of tone, and Massenet's orchestration, sense of timing and gentle melodic gifts seem to shine the brighter to me now.

I've been doing a bit of soul-searching in the light of the Havergal Brian debacle (by which I mean not the performance, impressive in itself if hardly beyond reproach given some of the ludicrously awkward writing, but the work itself, which should have been laid to rest after its last two Albert Hall outings). Surely there's much more substance in supposed froth like this than in a failed attempt at more profound thought. Especially in the sphere of music where, as in art as Delaunay had it, 'colour itself is form and subject' - or at any rate can be.


The instrumental ingenuity Massenet lavishes above all on his ballet music, following his good friend Bizet's example, seems boundless. I thought yesterday we'd listen to an Act 2 divertissement with a difference, starting with the chorally elaborated Entree du Roi/Les Filles de Noblesse and ending with the Rigaudon which incorporates the arrival of Pandolphe with Madame de la Haltiere and her daughters. I'd happily have played the three dances in between, all of them brilliantly costumed by Laurent Pelly at Covent Garden and choreographed with abundant invention by Laura Scozzi. Instead, I inserted the Castillane, Aragonaise and Aubade from Le Cid, even more dazzling in terms of orchestral colour and dance panache, shown to best advantage in one of the best ballet performances I've ever heard, with Jean Martinon conducting the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.


The best Cendrillon orchestral number of all is surely the culminating Marche des Princesses in Act 4, again wittily staged by Pelly as a slipper-fitting. This YouTube recording isn't ideal, but it gives a sense of its 'allure gaie'.



So we moved on rather swiftly yesterday to the two love duets. It's almost a paradox that the one which, dramatically speaking, is redundant should contain perhaps the most inflaming music in the opera. I still wish Pelly had given us not chimneystacks but a big oak in a broom-flowering heath with the moon and the sea in the background, not least so that it would be made clear how the Fairy Godmother makes the Prince Charming and Lucette invisible to each other by conjuring up a fragrant hedge. But it still sounded good, with the great Alice Coote burning as ever. I still don't mind going back to a tenor Prince since Gedda and Von Stade are so fine on that recording. I've since found a 1973 snippet - not enough, alas, to take us back to the magical framework - with Marilyn Horne as the Prince and a young Von Stade. The tempo for the 'extase supreme' sequence is terribly slow, as conducted by Horne's husband Henry Lewis, but the voices do fire us up.



The scene prompted a bout of pure indulgence yesterday. Which are the French duets which make the concept of the 'melodie eternelle' shine brightest? Two, I thought, from Delibes's Lakme - the passionate exchanges of the heroine and her English army officer - and three from Esclarmonde, that piece of dramatic hokum and rare musical genius composed for the freakish compass of beautiful American soprano Sybil Sanderson.


I'd have particularly liked to illustrate Esclarmonde's Act IV glory here, but all we have duets-wise on YouTube is the middle to the end of the 'nuit d'amour' in Act 2. At least it gives us a chance to hear one of the most beaten-bronze tenor voices of all times, that of Giacomo Aragall, alongside Sutherland.



Ici, tout fini bien: we've had our fun with Cendrillon, and now it's back to the Russian whetstone.

STOP PRESS: You may have guessed I've been fiddling about with this while listening to - rather than watching - the Murdoch enquiry. And then, suddenly, cries of 'outrageous' - I flick to pull up the screen, and it's frozen. Shots of a wall which looks like it's had three stripes of paint chucked over it. What I've just been getting, along with half the rest of the country, is a repeated 'Portcullis House. Line 4. The Wilton Room'. Beep. We'll all know the rest imminently - it seems Rupert Murdoch's been attacked by someone in the public gallery with a plate of shaving foam...Such is the strangeness of blogging 'real time'.

French delicacies

More immersion in delectable Leo Delibes after the Building a Library Coppelia, this time for the Royal Opera's website composer profiles, led me back to listen more carefully to the bits and bobs he wrote around the masterpieces. That's to say, his additions to Le Corsaire and his contributions to La Source - at least three unforgettable inspirations - as well as his incidental music for the 1882 revival of Victor Hugo's Le roi s'amuse (on its fiftieth anniversary, as the above playbill tells us).*

That's better know to us as Verdi's Rigoletto (Hugo's role, the jester Triboulet, has some of the hugest speeches in the repertoire, as Ken Stott so grippingly proved in Tony Harrison's brilliant adaptation for the National Theatre, The Prince's Play). The character Verdi presents to us as the Duke of Mantua was originally the French king Francois I (here seen in the famous portrait by Jean Clouet)


hence Delibes's little numbers in all sorts of period styles. He uses the same Pavane from Arbeau's Orchesographie to which Warlock later turned in his Capriol Suite, but the real delights are his own memorable and delicately-scored inventions. They include the opening Gaillarde with its sublimely simple trio section - inspiration, surely, for the beginning of Ravel's Le tombeau de Couperin; the 'Scene du bouquet' with its melancholy, pizzicato-accompanied cello theme; the Madrigal, which could be an Elgar miniature - remember that Elgar loved and often played these French bon-bouches; and the famous Passepied. Here it is in the composer's own transcription as fleetly played by Ossip Gabrilowitsch.



The orchestral performances to hear are those of Sir Thomas Beecham, always a perfect encorist (lollypop man, as he preferred): indeed, to set alongside these, I find only Sibelius's 'Song I' from The Tempest to be of such comparable understated, temperature-lowering but heart-warming perfection.

A corny link here, but the other French delicacies I have in mind are comestibles, those exquisitely prepared by the chef of the French Ambassador's residence. The menu reads like a poem, and not all the words in this strange new vocabulary could be translated by the French diners.


The menu was for the farewell of the gorgeous Laurence Auer, a never-too-grande dame I'm proud to call my friend since she has so much warmth and naturalness that I find it hard to believe she carried out so hyper-efficiently all her duties as the head of the French Institute (well, natural warmth is not inimical to high-flying hard work). She now leaves to take up an even more elevated cultural role in Paris.


Sante, Laurence, and congratulations on your recent marriage to the charming Bertrand, who played on Tuesday in loving honour.

*Rumour, or maybe more if scholarship has moved on, would have us believe that he also wrote the ballet music for Gounod's Faust - and missing it tonight in ENO's so-so new production, it struck me that apart from the trio tune it's the only musical inspiration in the later stages of the opera worth its salt. And there's even a hint of sensuousness in some of the numbers - which Delibes could manage, and which I find not a trace of evidence elsewhere to the effect that Gounod could, too.

Automata, French style

It's done and dusted, a little closer to the broadcast owing to the late scheduling: I've put Coppelia to bed for Building a Library on Radio 3's CD Review, and I certainly haven't tired of her. Delibes's score is full of the art that conceals art: clear and often ravishing orchestration; classically proportioned numbers and narratives that never go on too long; a perfect blend between the Hoffmanesque creepiness of the story on which the ballet is ever so loosly based and what Tchaikovsky called 'the pretty, le joli' in French music.

Totally out of the question at the moment to discuss my choice until the programme's aired on Saturday morning*, but I thought it might be helpful for those of you who don't find this score too twee - and, believe me, it's a tough cookie underneath - to see clips from the three DVDs I bring into the picture. Pure tradition first: an utterly enchanting two-act version from the Ecole de Danse of the Paris Opera Ballet. Giuseppina Bozzachi, who created the role of heroine Swanilda and is pictured above, was only 15 when she danced in 1870, just before she was cruelly felled by fever in the siege of Paris later that year. So Charline Giezendanner is just what we need for this childlike role - such eyes, such nimble footwork. And here we have a good stretch of the score, including the Lohengrin effect in the upper strings at the start. Pierre Lacotte is Coppelius and the decent conductor is David Coleman.



I did wonder, when Maguy Marin's updated free fantasia on the theme for Lyon Opera Ballet began, whether this was going to be another example of what the French call non-danse. But the corps numbers are ingenious and Marin, trained in the classical tradition from 8 to 18 until she discovered Bejart, manages to combine the funny and the sinister once the Marilyn fantasy-figure of Coppelia starts to multiply in a bizarre dream sequence in Act Two. The playing under Kent Nagano truly sparkles and the leg-scratching with the red shoes made me laugh out loud.



Finally, the Royal Ballet version choreographed by Ninette de Valois creaks a bit - all those grinning, nodding onlookers, so village-panto - and it's been supplanted for sheer affectionate humour by the Ashton Fille mal gardee. But unlike the other two versions, it does include most of the Act 3 divertissement, albeit reordered to give brilliant Carlos Acosta as well as wide-eyed Leanne Benjamin more to do. Couldn't find Acosta's leapyleapy on YouTube so instead here's this Act One sequence from the Ballad of the Ear of Corn (lovely violin solo) to the delectable Slavonic variations - based on a Polish theme by Moniuszko, my original piano score tells me.



Enjoy! You're stony hearted or a dedicated ballet-hater if you can't.

*The choice, I can now reveal, was Ansermet, with Mark Ermler and the Royal Opera House Orchestra a clear front runner, and a winner had they not lopped off twenty minutes of the score.