Mathieu Romano, Orchestre des Frivolités Parisiennes, Laurent Naouri – Massenet Don César de Bazan (1888 Version) (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:51:49 minutes | 1,96 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Naxos
Don César de Bazan is an opéra-comique with a narrative of dashing Spanish chivalry and romance. Its plot revolves around deception and comedies of reversed identity, with a struggle between true nobility and wicked selfishness maintaining an animated momentum throughout. This was the young Jules Massenet’s first full-length opera and yet it is filled with the composer’s mature symphonic style, his gift for melody, feeling for the picturesque, and vivacity of rhythm. These distinctive qualities reveal an operatic feast whose time has at last arrived.
Written in six weeks on a tatty little book and based on Victor Hugo’s Ruy Blas, Don César de Bazan is one of Jules Massenet’s first works. A comic-opera in the form of an espagnolade, a genre which was then highly fashionable and culminated three years later with Bizet’s Carmen. Don César is a youthful work not lacking in charm and a young Massenet adorns it with boléros, lullabies, love songs, drinking songs and choirs that highlight the comic aspect of an opera Saint-Saëns described as “light and elegant”.
The instrumental parts and the orchestral section of the original version were burnt during the fire of the Opéra Comique in 1887. As a result, Massenet wrote a new version based on edited piano-vocal scores. Lighter and more stout in its orchestration, it debuted at Geneva’s Grand Théâtre under the direction of the composer in 1888, before some limited showings in Anvers, La Haye, Lyon, Nice, Brussels and Paris before disappearing from memory. The oeuvre was brought back in 2016 in several French towns thanks to the Frivolités Parisiennes initiative who recorded it in 2019 in an entirely revised layout in co-production with the Théâtre Impérial de Compiègne.
Laurent Naouri plays the part of Don César, the great Spaniard who becomes governor of Grenada after his many adventures and sweet romance with Maritana, an ex-busker appointed Countess of Bazan played beautifully by Elsa Dreising. Founded in 2012, the Frivolités Parisiennes company sets itself the task of bringing back, in addition to its entire repertoire, the type of orchestra seen at the Opéra Comique which disappeared in the 60s. – François Hudry
Tracklist
1. Orchestre des Frivolités Parisiennes – Overture
2. Elsa Dreisig – Dès que ton tambour sonne
3. Elsa Dreisig – C’est elle!
4. Laurent Naouri – Partout où l’on chante
5. Laurent Naouri – Le voilà!
6. Laurent Naouri – Bohème charmante
7. Orchestre des Frivolités Parisiennes – Entr’acte
8. Marion Lebegue – Dors, ami
9. Laurent Naouri – Riche, j’ai semé les richesses
10. Laurent Naouri – Me marier!
11. Laurent Naouri – À boire, amis
12. Marion Lebegue – Rien ne peut le défendre
13. Laurent Naouri – Grand Dieu!
14. Orchestre des Frivolités Parisiennes – Entr’acte Sevillana
15. Elsa Dreisig – Cette splendeur
16. Thomas Bettinger – Que de ta lèvre en fleur
17. Laurent Naouri – Qui je suis?
18. Laurent Naouri – Je m’en souviens
19. Orchestre des Frivolités Parisiennes – Entr’acte
20. Elsa Dreisig – Aux cœurs les plus troublés
21. Laurent Naouri – Je pénétrai
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