By Ralph P. Locke

Each of these four works has its own flavor, and lovers of Baroque and Classic-era music will happily scoop up one or more of the recordings.

Recording of Zingarelli’s Giulietta e Romeo with the Orchestre de l’Opéra Royal at the Château de Versailles. Photo: Pascal Le Mée

Domenico Cimarosa: L’Olimpiade
Les Talens Lyriques, cond. Christophe Rousset.
Versailles 143 [2 CDs] 146 minutes.

Mademoiselle Duval: Les Génies ou les Caractères de l’amour.
Choeur de l’Opéra Royal, Ensemble il Caravaggio, cond. Camille Delaforge.
Versailles 121 [2 CDs] 142 minutes.

George Frideric Handel: Poro re delle Indie.
Il Groviglio, cond. Marco Angioloni.
Versailles 123 [3 CDs] 160 minutes.

Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre: Céphale et Procris.
Namur Chamber Chorus and A Nocte Temporis, cond. Reinoud van Mechelen.
Versailles 119 [2 CDs] 147 minutes.;

Record labels that used to be considered “major” have, in recent years, cut back greatly on their new classical releases. So it is worth stressing that others have arisen to fill at least some of the gap, not least in the area of early music. In a previous review here, I drew attention to the astonishing flood of releases by the French label Chateau de Versailles Spectacles. And that wasn’t my first Versailles Spectacles review: see, for example, here (Charpentier), here (Pergolesi and Mozart), and here (Gluck’s final opera).

It’s two months later, and I already have four more Versailles Spectacles releases to report on. To avoid overloading the header above, I have listed only the ensembles and conductors; the major singers will be named in the review.

Astonishingly, two of the conductors also sing the leading male role in their opera: tenor Marco Angioloni in the Handel, and “haute-contre” (i.e., high tenor — not countertenor, as the word might seem to suggest) Reinoud van Mechelen in the Jacquet de la Guerre. The other two conductors play continuo in their respective recordings, but of course this is a form of double-duty that we encounter more frequently.

Three of the recordings (all but the Handel) are world premieres, and two of the operas are by female composers. Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre (1665-1729) was a renowned harpsichordist and composer during the reign of Louis XIV, best known for her keyboard and chamber works. The opera heard here, Céphale et Procris (1694), was very successful in her lifetime. Mademoiselle Duval (1718-75) was less well known, and scholars haven’t even figured out her first name. But her opera heard here, Les Génies, survives, though in a version that omitted the inner string and choral parts, e.g., violas and altos. (The necessary restorations have been made here by Benoît Dratwicki, director of the renowned Versailles Center for Baroque Music. You can see the manuscript on IMSLP.)

Cimarosa’s L’olimpiade (1784) is set to a libretto by Metastasio that was used by dozens of other composers. Handel’s Poro, re delle Indie (1731) was a triumph in his own day but then sank out of sight for two centuries; there have been two previous recordings: one superbly conducted by Fabio Biondi, the other (which I have not heard) from the 2006 Göttingen Festival. (YouTube also has a pirated live recording of a concert version from the Kennedy Center in 1978, featuring mezzo Beverly Wolff in the title role. This was the US premiere of the Handel opera.)

Each of these four works has its own flavor, and lovers of Baroque and Classic-era music will happily scoop up one or more of the recordings, not least because of the full, illustrated booklets, which contain excellent essays, vivid illustrations, and the libretto in several languages (always including the original and English). The translations are, as with earlier Versailles Spectacles releases, sometimes awkward or even inept (“forward” for “foreword” in one essay). Occasionally the German renderings are more easily comprehensible than the English ones. But I admit that eighteenth-century libretti, especially, are hard to translate, unless one resorts to paraphrasing and adds lots of footnotes. In the Duval and Jacquet de la Guerre, the libretto translation is credited to a firm rather than an individual, which may perhaps explain some shortcomings.

Listening to these works in close succession, I was struck by the great variety in plot, characterization, and musical form and style. Much of this can be explained by the fact that, during the century or so from the earliest to the latest of these works, French operas were structured according to very different principles and priorities than were Italian ones. Most basically, Italian operas (including those by Mozart) consisted of arias and ensembles separated by simple (or “secco”—i.e., continuo-accompanied) recitative, whereas French operas accompanied their recitatives by the orchestra and included far more participation by the chorus, as well as numerous orchestral movements — sometimes a dozen or two! — for onstage dancing. These dance movements are often labeled “air,” i.e., “tune for character or group X to dance to.”

Of the four works, Handel’s Poro has been most often and most thoroughly discussed. I strongly recommend the chapter in Winton Dean’s authoritative Handel’s Operas, 1726-1741, as well as (ahem!) my compare/contrast of that opera and Hasse’s Cleofide: both works derive from the same Metastasio libretto, Alessandro nell’Indie, which elaborates freely on some historical facts about Alexander the Great’s military conquest of India. (A scan of my article is online here.) The characters are very interestingly differentiated by the librettist, not least the woman-obsessed rajah Poro (known to history as Poros or, in Latin, Porus). This portrait of a ruler as greedy and suspicious was presumably meant not so much as a realistic image of life on the other side of the world as an admonition to Western rulers and other people in positions of power on how not to behave.

The other main characters in Poro are Cleofide (who is queen of a neighboring region to that of Poro and is engaged to marry him), Alessandro (Alexander the Great), the latter’s lieutenant Timagene (a despicable schemer), and a loving couple: Gandarte (an adviser to Poro) and Erissena (Poro’s sister, though, problematically, she is attracted to Alessandro). Among other complications, Poro, to protect himself from Alessandro, is most of the time disguised as “Asbite,” and Gandarte is therefore left to impersonate his boss Poro. There is also a false rumor of Poro’s having drowned while attempting to escape, and this leads to a particularly touching lament by Cleofide. Among other wonderful moments in Poro are a pair of arias for Poro and Cleofide that are reprised later in the work, at a moment when the plot shifts greatly the meaning of their previously uttered words.

Of the other three operas, the earliest is Jacquet de la Guerre’s, whose libretto is freely based on elements from two separate books by Ovid. After a highly tuneful, multi-movement prologue in honor of Louis XIV, we encounter Borée, the prince of Thrace, who has set his sights on the Athenian princess Procris, who, however, loves Céphale. Various divine figures interfere between Procris and Céphale: Aurore, goddess of dawn, falls in love with the latter and falsely reports to him that Procris now loves the Thracian prince, and mounts an extended divertissement to lure Céphale into savoring the pleasures of love with her rather than with Procris. Procris eventually is injected with a poison by the figure of Jealousy, and this leads her to reject Céphale and to sing a lament different in style, of course, from Cleofide’s in the Handel work but no less effective. In the last act, Céphale accidentally wounds Procris, she descends into Purgatory, and he, distraught, follows. As you might imagine the plot’s various changes of locale and interventions by supernatural figures help motivate, again and again, the insertion of attractive dances and celebratory, or sometimes bewailing, choruses. As with so many French operas of the period, this one makes for continuously engaging listening, because of (as I already mentioned) its lack of secco recitatives.

Next chronologically (after the intervening Handel) is Mademoiselle Duval’s Les Génies, ou Les Caractères de l’amour. The booklet-essay by the conductor, Camille Delaforge, explains that, with this work, “Mademoiselle Duval the Elder” became the second female composer (after Jacquet de la Guerre) to have an opera performed at the Paris Opéra (officially, during this era, the Académie Royale de Musique). Duval was also known as a singer, and she played continuo at her opera’s premiere. The work was given nine times “with great success” — and then vanished until resurrected for this set of performances and the resulting recording.

The work, like Rameau’s contemporaneous and enormously beloved (then and now) Les Indes galantes, enacts a series of self-contained love stories, one per act. Each story is set in a different locale and with different characters, hence the work’s subtitle, alluding to the different ways that love can play out in different locales. The four acts are also associated, in a somewhat forced manner, with the famous “four elements”: water, earth, fire, and air.

After a prologue that features Zoroaster and Cupid (Amour), the four settings are a seaside garden, a grove populated by gnomes, a palace, and the realm of the sylphs. The music, as the essay by Dratwicki explains, is conservative, being more similar to that of Lully, Campra, and Mouret than to that of the more dramatically inclined Rameau. But, as heard here, it is immensely appealing, and shows a natural affinity for the dance element that is so important an aspect of nearly all French Baroque music.

Finally, Cimarosa’s L’Olimpiade was first performed in Vicenza in 1784, at which point Handel had been dead for 25 years and several of Mozart’s mature operas (including Idomeneo and The Abduction from the Seraglio) had already reached the stage. The plot involves love, deception, and disguise among young people in ancient Greece, one of whom (Megacle) has competed in the Olympics under the name of his friend Licida. A word of warning: Licida and Aminta are both male characters, despite the fact that their names end in a; in Greek they would be Lycidas and Amyntas. (I summarized the plot more fully in my review in Arts Fuse of Hasse’s equally enchanting setting.) Here I particularly enjoyed the frequent orchestrally accompanied recitatives (sometimes involving more than one character), which are fully as dramatic as those in Mozart operas of the same era.

The orchestras and choruses in all four recordings are first-rate nearly throughout. (Intonation is questionable in the Cimarosa overture but then settles down.) Tempos are always sensible, neither frantically fast nor ponderously slow, and are often allowed to vary or taper in a natural-sounding way. Early-music performance has really come a long way since the at times scrappy efforts of the ’60s-’70s! The one exception here is in the Duval: sometimes conductor Camille Laforge doesn’t set a clear tempo at the outset of a movement and, in at least one case, I had to listen multiple times to a track and still couldn’t consistently grasp where the downbeats fall (CD1 Track 18).

The Duval and Handel were recorded in the Versailles palace’s Salles des Croisades; the Cimarosa in a Paris recital hall (the 200-seat Salle Colonne, built in 1937); and the Jacquet de la Guerre in a modern concert hall constructed within a former military riding school in Namur. In all four, the singers and instrumentalists are captured cleanly, with just enough resonance, and are well balanced.

The leading vocalists and most of the secondary ones supply near-constant pleasure, conveying the French or Italian texts with precision and naturalness. It helps that, in the two French operas, most of the singers are native Francophones. French, with its complex and varied vowels (nasals, closed eu/oeu sound, narrow u, “mute” e), is famously hard to sing well if one isn’t born to it. Listeners may be startled by the historically informed pronunciation in the earliest of these works, the Jacquet de la Guerre: for example, oi is sung “weh” instead of “wah.” But, with libretto in hand, one gradually adjusts.

In that same opera, I was pleased to reencounter high tenor van Mechelen (as Céphale) and also now experience him as an effective conductor; two other familiar and welcome faces (so to speak) are soprano Gwendoline Blondeel (in three roles), and tenor Marc Mauillon (likewise in three). I also rejoiced in discovering two sopranos I had not previously heard: Ema Nikolovska (as Aurore) and Déborah Cachet (as Procris). Argentine bass-baritone Lisandro Abadie takes on two roles sonorously and with good feeling, but — as is often the case with low-voiced early-music singers these days — lacks oomph at the bottom of his range. (Conrad L. Osborne, in a chapter wittily called “the low end vanishes,” has pointed out this deficiency in recent vocal training generally; see my review of his book Opera as Opera: The State of the Art.)

Notable in the Handel are countertenor Christopher Lowrey as Poro, soprano Lucía Martín Cartón as Cleofide, and — very capable if slightly less vivid and distinctive — tenor Marco Angioloni as the great Alessandro. The prominent young Paris-based harpsichordist Nora Dargazanli offers special insights at the keyboard, and Angioloni, in his other function as conductor, varies Handel’s indicated orchestration at times, to splendid effect. I would have trouble choosing between this recording and the equally distinguished one (mentioned above) conducted by Biondi, which features the magnificent mezzo Gloria Banditelli as Alessandro.

Mademoiselle Duval’s opera has five sets of characters (for the prologue and the four distinct acts); most of the singers have been assigned two roles or even three. Florie Valiquette gives consistent pleasure, as she did in operas by Leclair, Salieri, and Saint-Saëns. The other female singers are generally quite strong, notably Marie Perbost and Anna Reinhold, except that the latter wobbles on long-held high notes. Three of the four men (Étienne de Bénazé, Paco Garcia, Matthieu Walendzik) sound bright and firm up high but sometimes much paler down low. Guilhem Worms is that rare bird (these days): a true, full bass, as one can also hear on the recent and wondrous recording of Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète.

In the Cimarosa, I was delighted to be able to hear Marie Lys (as Argene) again; she was my favorite cast member in the recent recording of Paër’s Leonora, ossia L’Amore coniugale. Most of the others are new to me, including Josh Lovell as Clistene (an amazing high tenor, except that he is another singer who can barely reach his role’s lowest notes), the bright high soprano Rocio Pérez as Aristea, mezzo Mathilde Ortscheidt (as Licida), mezzo Maite Beaumont (as Megacle, a role that, in the work’s first performances, was taken by a soprano castrato), and (at a slightly lower level of excellence than the rest) Alex Banfield (Aminta).

In short, this is quite a varied harvest from the astonishingly productive Versailles Spectacles label. May the project continue to flourish!

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 behind the wide-ranging open-access periodical Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal. The present review first appeared in American Record Guide and is included here by kind permission.