By Ralph P. Locke

The BEMF performed the work in July 2023 in New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall, to enormous enthusiasm.

Circé, Henry Desmarest

Lucile Richardot (Circé), Teresa Wakim (Astérie), Amanda Forsythe (Éolie), Aaron Sheehan (Ulisse), Jesse Blumberg (Elphénor), Douglas Williams (Polite).

Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra and Chorus, musical direction by Paul O’Dette, Stephen Stubbs, and Robert Mealy.

CPO 555-594 [3 CDs] 199 minutes.

To purchase or hear any track, click here.

If you love French Baroque music, you have heaven awaiting you here, or at least a three-hour taste of it! I had never heard of Henry Desmarest (1661-1741) until recently, but was delighted to receive, in close succession, not one but two recordings of his previously unrecorded full-length opera Circé (1694): one recorded at the royal opera house in the Versailles palace (which I reviewed here), and this one, put out by the Boston Early Music Festival (BEMF). Each is enormously accomplished and can claim to be a World Premiere Recording, since one got released on CD before the other but the reverse was the case with the release on the streaming service Spotify.

In addition, the BEMF performed the work in July 2023 in New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall, to enormous enthusiasm. The performance used a different singer for the title role (Karina Gauvin), who was apparently as fine in her way as the one heard on the BEMF’s recording. I recommend Lee Eiseman’s detailed and perceptive review of the Boston performance in the Boston Musical Intelligencer.

I reviewed, enthusiastically, the Versailles recording, which is sung by a cast of native French-speakers, including the rightly renowned Véronique Gens and the energetic and insightful Mathias Vidal. The BEMF recording features mostly English-speakers and a few from France, but they have all been superbly coached in the language by famed theater-director Gilbert Blin. The one big star is Lucile Richardot, who needs no coaching in any aspect of her art, as I have noted in regard to Ophélie Gaillard’s A Night in London CD, on which she sang in expertly delivered English. (See my review here.)

The Desmarest recording was made in the studio of Radio Bremen (Germany), where BEMF’s previous opera recordings were likewise made, including one that I recently praised here: Graupner’s Antiochus und Stratonica. The period-instrument orchestra is led by violinist Robert Mealy and lutenists Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs. The continuo group contains yet a third plucked-string player, Charles Weaver, plus a harpsichordist, Michael Sponseller, and a gamba player, Laura Jeppesen. So we get lovely variety in the occasional passages accompanied only by continuo.

Most of the opera is very much orchestrally accompanied, allowing us to enjoy the refreshing alternation of two oboes, two recorders, two bassoons, and an active (but not obnoxious) percussionist, along with sweet or stormy figurations from the 16-piece string ensemble. The tempos set by the ensemble’s three guiding spirits (Mealy, O’Dette, and Stubbs) always seem responsive to both the drama and the needs of the music.

Amanda Forsythe and Karina Gauvin in the Boston Early Music Festival’s 2023 production of  Circé. Photo: Kathy Wittman

I summarized the plot in my previous review: it’s about how the sorceress Circe imprisoned Ulysses and his sailors for a time on her island, preventing him from returning from the Trojan Wars to rejoin his beloved wife Penelope. (I use here the familiar English versions of the characters’ names; the French names are in the header.)

The singing is highly fluent throughout. Even the briefer roles are taken by such skilled vocalists as Brian Giebler. (His solo CD a lad’s love was nominated for a Grammy.) Aaron Sheehan sang the title role in Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s La descente d’Orphée aux enfers, a BEMF recording that won a Grammy in 2015. He is less incisive here than Mathias Vidal is on the Versailles recording, but definitely steady and perhaps even more touching for maintaining an understated manner. Lucile Richardot proves once again her utter specialness: we are lucky to have this young mezzo in the world of early music: she can vary her vocal production from gentle to intense and with seemingly endless nuances in between.

As I said in my review of the Versailles recording, French Baroque opera provides a near-constant feast of musical delights by preferring arioso over orchestral music to “dry” continuo-supported recitative, and by its frequent introduction of scene-preludes, instrumental numbers for dancers, and choral contributions. I recommend Desmarest’s marvelously varied opera in either of its two World-Premiere Recordings: one from Versailles, the other from the Athens of the New World (or the Hub of the Universe, as some prefer)!

Ralph P. Locke is emeritus professor of musicology at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music. Six of his articles have won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for excellence in writing about music. His most recent two books are Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections and Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart (both Cambridge University Press). Both are now available in paperback; the second, also as an e-book. Ralph Locke also contributes to American Record Guide and to the online arts-magazines New York Arts, Opera Today, and The Boston Musical Intelligencer. His articles have appeared in major scholarly journals, in Oxford Music Online (Grove Dictionary), and in the program books of major opera houses, e.g., Santa Fe (New Mexico), Wexford (Ireland), Glyndebourne, Covent Garden, and the Bavarian State Opera (Munich). He is part of the editorial team of Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal, an open-access source that includes contributions by performers (soprano Elly Ameling) as well as noted scholars (Robert M. Marshall, Peter Bloom) and is read around the world. The present review first appeared in American Record Guide and appears here with kind permission.