Lecocq: La Fille de Madame Angot

Day 134

Lecocq: la Fille de Madame Angot

Soloists

Choeur du Concert Spirituel

Orchestra de chamber de Paris

Sébastien Rouland

La Fille de Madame Angot was one of the most popular of all light French operas in the 19th century. According to Wikipedia it was performed in more than 100 French towns and cities within a year of its first performance and was produced all over the world. This is a recording in the Bru Zane series so there is a lot of interesting detail in the accompanying book, including Lecocq’s own reminiscences of how he came to write the score.  The title will be familiar because of the ballet version choreographed by Massine, which broadly follows the plot of the opera and uses much of its music. So some of the score was familiar to me from that context.

I must confess to a slight disappointment with the opera. Everything I have read about it suggests that it was one of the finest of all these lighter operas with a really high quality score. I didn’t quite hear it that way. It was clearly the work of a very accomplished composer and is full of interesting ideas but to me it didn’t quite hit the spot. There weren’t as many memorable numbers as I was expecting - indeed I don’t think that there was any really big tune in the whole of the first act. There were some in the latter acts, including a rather gorgeous waltz theme at the end of the second movement. The score was more overtly operatic than I was expecting - with many recitative and filling in passages that would not have been out of place in Meyerbeer. Perhaps Lecoq did not quite get the balance right between serious and light music. The comparison with yesterday’s opera by Verney is illuminating: Lecocq was clearly the more accomplished composer yet the much more basic score by Verney fizzed off the page in a way that the Lecocq didn’t.  It is surprising to me that la Fille was taken up by so many amateur operatic societies - it can’t be an easy piece to put together.

Varney: Les Mousquetaires au couvent

Day 133

Varney: Les Mousquetaires au couvent

Soloists 

Orchestra Symphonique de la RTBF

Edgard Doneux

For the next few days I am crossing the channel and concentrating on one of my main interests - 19th century French Opera. Louis Varney (1844-1908) was was prolific composer of opéra comique/operetta. This is the only one of his pieces which has retained even a tenuous place in the repertoire. 

I found it a delight and thoroughly enjoyed making its acquaintance. As I have commented before there is no fundamental distinction between ‘serious’ and ‘light’ French operas. The basic musical language is broadly the same and differences are a matter of nuance rather anything more fundamental. So here we have elements of Auber and Rossini, but also Meyerbeer and on to Messager, with the shadow of Offenbach always in the background.  Varney has a very attractive lyrical musical voice with some real knockout melodies. The story - men doing into disguise to rescue pretty young girls from a convent -has similarities with with Le Comte Ory  and Princess Ida and gives lots of opportunities for attractive melodic writing for the female soloists in thirds. There is so much to enjoy here and there were many times when it made me smile or even laugh out loud. The verve is irresistible.

I’m looking forward exploring more of this repertory over the next few days.

Grainger: The Jungle Book

Day 132

Grainger the Jungle Book

Polyphony

Stephen Layton

I’ve got to know a lot of Grainger’s music over the years - there is certainly more to him than Country Gardens and Handel in the Strand, delightful as they are. He is an intriguing figure - like more of the Frankfurt gang he was certainly rather odd (I don’t recall any other composer’s biography which includes naked photographs of subject and his wife) and he spent a lot of his later life experimenting with what he called free music using machines that he invented. One suspects that had been born a generation or two later he would have been a leading figure in the development of electro-acoustic music.

This setting of extracts from Kipling’s Jungle Book occupied Grainger on and off for 50 years. Some of the pieces are for unaccompanied voices, others are accompanied by a typically eccentric combination of instruments, including Grainger’s beloved saxophones.  I found the whole thing fascinating. Some of it was in a fairly characteristic folk-music style but others were quite wild with some extraordinary vocal and instrumental sonorities. Sometimes Grainger’s music can be rather gluttonous, with thick orchestration and and highly chromatic harmonies. There is some of this here, but in other places there is real lightness of touch.

It is hard to imagine that the whole cycle could be performance very often - the choral writing is virtuosic and a large group of instruments is required , some of which play for only a few moments. But as a one-off is was certainly a fascinating piece.

I discovered quite recently that I have a family connection with Grainger - a distant great uncle knew Grainger well and there is correspondence between them in the published Grainger correspondence. Finding  out about that gave me real pleasure.

Sullivan: Overture to the Sapphire Necklace

Day 131

Sullivan: Overture to The Sapphire Necklace

RTE Concert Orchestra

Andrew Penny

Sullivan was the subject of my PhD thesis so I am familiar with most of his output but I had not heard this before. The Sapphire Necklace is a bit of a mystery. It was written in the early 1860s (it is his first opera) but although it seems to have been finished it was never performed and the score has disappeared. A couple of songs were published and the overture survives in piano-conductor’s score of military band arrangement. There have been various attempts at orchestrating it - this one is by Roderic Spencer. 

The piece shows clearly that the young Sullivan was a highly competent Leipzig-school composer. The beginning is dramatic but it then develops into something which is recognisable as Sullivanesque. Who knows what the history of English music might have been had the opera been performed. Would Sullivan have developed into a major composer of something equivalent to French Opèra Comique. Something like an English Bizet or Messager? An intriguing thought.

Scott: Lotus Land

Day 130

Cyril Scott: Lotus Land

Percy Grainger

Cyril Scott was  another member of the Frankfurt gang, several of whose members have featured (or will later) in this series.  Like most of the other members he was a slight odd figure, with, in his case, an interest in alternative medicine and the occult. His vast output is almost completely forgotten. This short piano piece is his most famous work. It is the only recording of his music I have in my collection. The performance is by Percy Grainger - the one member of the gang whose music has remained at all well known.

Lotus Land, from 1905, had a great vogue in the early years of the last century, mainly because it was taken up by the violinist Fritz Kreisler, who made an arrangement for violin and piano. To me it sounded as if a talented pianist familiar with the work of Debussy had sat down at the piano and improvised in a vaguely impressionistic style. It was quite attractive to listen to but rather cliched, without any real musical individuality of its own.  To me it was an interesting novelty but no more. I can’t imagine wanting to spend any more time with Cyril Scott, though perhaps buried in his vast output there might be things worth listening to.  But I am not tempted to take the time to find out.

Quilter: Three English Dances

Day 129

Quilter: Three English Dances

Northern Sinfonia

Richard Hickox

I’ve never had a particular interest in the 20th century English song tradition so although I do know a few of Quilter’s songs he is a not a composer I knew much about - the only orchestral piece of his I can recall hearing is the Children’s Overture.  These three dances date from 1911. I found them pleasant enough but at the same time not particularly memorable. There’s nothing of the wit that Grainger - a fellow member of the Frankfurt Gang (see day 127) - brought to such music. One felt that any competent English composer of the time could have turned out music like this almost on demand without too much effort or thought. Quilter fills up a space in the alphabetical list of composers in this blog but I am not sure that, based on this music, he does much more than that!

German: Dances from Henry VIII

Day 128

Edward German: Dances from Henry VIII

Northern Sinfonia

Richard Hickox

Edward German is best remembered as the composer of Merrie England, a work which was once the mainstay of amateur musical societies - Wikipedia says that over 500 amateur societies performed the opera in Queen Elizabther’s coronation year - and I believe that when Sadlers Wells was looking at how to open its first season after the war there were many who suggested that Merrie England would have been a better choice than Peter Grimes.  I wonder how the history of music in post-war England might have gone had they got their way.

These dances, written for Irving’s 1892 production, were delightful. I have expected them to be very much in the ‘ye olde England’ tradition but they were fresh as a daisy. What did surprise me was how French they sounded - at times we seemed to be in the world of Delibes or Massenet. German’s career seems to have fizzled out around the turn of the century and he seems to have been saddened by the changing tastes in music which meant that his work seemed old-fashioned.  I hadn’t realised that he lives through to 1936, so much do I think of his as a late Victorian/Edwardian figure. But quality light music such as these dances will always be worth listening to - there is room both for  Merrie England and Peter Grimes in the musical pantheon.