Discovering Danco through Ansermet

Continuing to dig in to the huge discography (300 plus Suisse Romande recordings for Decca alone) of Ernest Ansermet long after the BBC Radio 3 discussion of his legacy - the edited version still to be heard for the next few days on the BBC iPlayer here starting at 53m27s - I ordered up five discs from the Australian-based Eloquence wing of Decca, not least to explore his few opera recordings. And here I came across a voice I only previously knew through the Josef Krips Don Giovanni and Erich Kleiber Figaro, Brussels-born Suzanne Danco. Her lyric soprano is not so light as ever to be dubbed 'soubrette' - she sang Ellen Orford at La Scala, Marie in Wozzeck and Mimi - but it's the personality in everything she sings that shines through.

Anyone, for instance, who gets annoyed with poor Mélisande - abused, Maeterlinck would have us assume, by her previous lord and master Bluebeard before Golaud discovers her lost in the forest - might find this characterisation stronger than usual. There's certainly nothing wan or wispy about it, and you hear the pain creep in when Debussy needs it. As for the whole of this 1952 Pelléas et Mélisande, I think this may be the most compelling version I've ever heard on CD - I wish I'd known it when I spent six Monday afternoons on the work for my Opera in Depth course.

The classic Désormière recording of over a decade earlier is also very speech-melody conscious, and there will possibly never be a better Pelléas than Jacques Jansen (Ansermet's Pierre Mollet is also excellent). But here the sound is so much better, and Ansermet, preferring a forward sense of movement throughout to 'burn off the mists' long before Boulez, makes his strings sigh with pain and love. You can more or less understand, with even just a little French, what's being sung about just by listening without a libretto. Quelle clarté! I'd still turn to some recent recordings for further beauty of orchestral texturing, but I simply don't want to listen to a non-French cast who doesn't understand every nuance.

It's curious to see Danco get top billing in Ansermet's recording of Ravel's L'enfant et les sortilèges when in fact she sings not the role of the reactive child but the meltingly beautiful aria of the picture-book princess. Again, the pointillist detail of Ansermet's interpretation as captured in the bright old Decca recording is fabulous (even if the last chords of the Five O'Clock Foxtrot seem not to be fully scored) and here's Hugues Cuénod excelling, too, as old man Maths. Danco and her Golaud, Heinz Rehfuss, turn up in the aurally otiose L'Heure espagnole, too. But she's most bewitching in the Deux mélodies hébraïques - the first of which gives the strongest sense of the power she can unleash when necessary - and Shéhérazade. So full of charm and meaning, again, even if not as luxuriously upholstered as the classic version with Régine Crespin. Which I had quite forgotten is also an Ansermet/Suisse Romande special. Real gap in the library there - must correct.

On the same set there's the first of Ansermet's Boléros with the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra. a good couple of minutes more leisurely than his Suisse Romande version. I was glad to find out that his recording of Hérold's Zampa Overture is lurid with character, explaining why I was so obsessed with this piece as a child (I took out the Ace of Diamonds LP of French overtures at least twice from Sutton Library). And the Haydn revelation continues with renewed admiration for the mixed moods of Symphony No. 83 (the hen-peckings follow a dark start) and the charm of No. 84's finale (funny how the un-soubriquet-ed symphonies often seem to be overshadowed) in the set of 'Paris' Symphonies. The discoveries keep on giving.

On a very un-French footnote, I also confirmed for myself the total-classic status of this recording of Britten's first opera, operetta, musical, call it what you will. 

Having been disappointed with so much about the Wilton's mishandling of Paul Bunyan, despite some excellent casting, I came home, and confirmed the work's masterpiece status thanks to a cast under Philip Brunelle that puts it across with exemplary clarity (that word again, not so evocative in English).   

After Pelléas, Ariadne and Tito

'Ah! I breathe at last!...I thought for a moment that I was going to be ill in those enormous vaults.' Following Pelléas's cue as he emerges onto a sunlit terrace after a terrifying time in the depths of the gloomy old castle, I think most of us in my Opera in Depth course at the Frontline Club were glad to get out into the sunny streets of Paddington after the last of four and a half Monday afternoon immersed in the world of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande. Some of us will be staying in the light for Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos next Monday. Pelléas was hard emotional work, though. It's probably the most exquisitely refined and orchestrally ravishing operatic score ever written, but as a drama more cruel and harsh than it is soft and beautiful.

We've been aware of its multiple meanings, but above all how it functions both as the most straightforward triangle - as Richard Jones put it to me when I first met him as he was working on the ENO production, 'two men fall in love with the same woman, with disastrous results' - and as so much more, partly intimated by Arthur Symons: 'we have two innocent lovers, to whom love is guilt; we have blind vengeance, aged and helpless wisdom; we have the conflict of passions fighting in the dark, destroying what they most desire in the world'.

Ascribe that first to Maeterlinck's nightmarish play, following his obsession with the destruction of the young by the old. Of course Debussy completely transfigures it with his music of nature, reaching its most dreamlike, minimalist, barely-audible apogee in the scene at the grotto by the sea. But he knows how to unleash the full harshness  - at the end of Act Three and in Act Four, in the scenes of the insanely jealous Golaud's abusive cruelty to his son and wife, the musical violence is extreme. This made an interesting comparison with the pathology of the protagonist in Verdi's Otello, on which we'd spent the first five and a half weeks of the summer term - the difference being that Golaud has real cause for his jealousy, whereas Otello does not.

As well as snippeting sound recordings by Désormière - the classic and text-unsurpassable 1941 recording with Irène Joachim and Jacques Jansen - and by Karajan, featuring an superb José Van Dam and Frederica von Stade, we stuck for visuals with the 1999 Glyndebourne production by Graham Vick on DVD. I'm kicking myself that I never saw it at the time; apart from possibly being the most visually arresting production ever seen at the Sussex house, with its flowers under the floor, spiral staircase and peeling gold walls, the focus on nuance from John Tomlinson, Christiane Oelze and Richard Croft is ideal for video close-up. We came away devastated from the tower scene (Mélisande actually hangs backwards from a huge deco light, as you can see in the DVD cover up top) and, yesterday, from the disturbing death of Act 5, as quiet and strange as the lovers' unaccompanied 'je t'aime'/'je t'aime aussi'.

Much more to say on this, but the advertising point here is that we move on and for the next two Mondays, I've added two extra one-off classes on Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos (24 July) and Mozart's La clemenza di Tito (31 July), tying in with the Glyndebourne productions (scene from the Ariadne opera in the 2017 revival, image by Robert Workman). Same time, 2.30pm-4.30pm, location a private house generously loaned by a friend just down the road from our usual venue. the superb Frontline Club. If you're interested in coming along - or indeed if you're interested in next season's course, which will start with La bohème, including (I hope) another visit from Richard Jones, he director of the new production due at the Royal Opera - leave a message here with your email. I won't publish it but I promise to reply.