Lalo: Le roi d’Ys. Cyrille Dubois (Mylio), Kate Aldrich (Margared), Judith van Wanroij (Rozenn), Jérôme Boutillier (Karnac), Nicolas Courjal (Le roi), Christian Helmer (Jahel/Saint Corentin). Hungarian National Choir; Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra. György Vashegyi (conductor). Bru Zane 1060 CD. 2 disks. Total Time: 102:19.
DIGITAL REVIEW — Édouard Lalo (1823-1892) wrote an “apprentice years” opera and left an incomplete opera, both heard posthumously. But his only viable stage work was Le Roi d’Ys, well worth getting to know in this sparkling new recording. The composer himself was from Lille (in Hauts-de-France, near the Belgian border), but his contralto wife Julie Besnier de Maligny hailed from Brittany and encouraged him to write an opera steeped in the seaside province’s mythology.
In the West Breton region of Cornouaille, a war between the invading prince Karnac and the King of Ys has ceased on the condition that Karnac marry the latter’s daughter Margared. But she jealously pines for Mylio, her gentler sister Rozenn’s lifelong fiancé, and she connives with Karnac to flood the city with seawater during the Rozenn/Mylio marriage. Only the repentant Margared’s Senta-like sacrificial leap into the sea wards off — with saintly intervention’s help — total disaster.
Besnier de Maligny premiered some excerpts of the work — originally finished by 1875 — but Parisian operatic politics have always been a minefield, and revisions were demanded. It finally had its debut at Paris’ Opéra Comique in 1888, with two singers who made their mark on operatic history. Blanche Deschamps-Jéhin, who assumed Mme. Lalo’s intended part of Margared, also created Massenet’s Hérodiade and Mme. de la Haltière in Cendrillon, as well as La Mère in Charpentier’s Louise. The tenor Jean-Alexandre Talazac’s creations besides Mylio were even more enduring: Offenbach’s Hoffmann, Massenet’s Des Grieux, and Gérald in Delibes’ Lakmé.
Bru Zane, a foundation, has engaged in a longtime project of well-researched, stylistically apt, and often concert-based recordings. As in his recent issue for the same company of Massenet’s baritone version of Werther, Budapest-born conductor György Vashegyi shows himself an exceptionally sensitive and idiomatic interpreter of French 19th-century music, which can be a challenge even for good conductors not in tune with the diction-based style. His impressive Hungarian orchestra does justice to Lalo’s fine writing for cellos and double basses. (The composer is best known for his 1876 Cello Concerto in D minor and the 1875 violin-centered Symphonie espagnole, his most-played and recorded orchestral work.)
Throughout the lively piece, Lalo’s orchestration shows skill and taste, with effectively built ensembles and well-deployed instrumental color, especially in deft use of reeds. The well-engineered recording captures this — and a good balance with the solo voice — very satisfyingly. It’s a relatively short score for a three-act opera; the division here in between the two “tableaux” of Act Two does little damage now that most listeners stream music or have multi-disc players.
The opera’s longish overture, bearing some traces of Lohengrin‘s influence, has won some concert-piece status; Carnegie Hall first heard it in 1897 under Walter Damrosch, and it later was led by Mahler, Monteux, Munch, and Mitropoulos. The tenor lover Mylio’s tender aubade “Vainement, ma bien aimée” also enjoys a life of its own. Mahler (again) brought it to Carnegie with the great Edmond Clément, and tenors from John McCormack to Juan Diego Flórez have followed suit. Unsurprisingly, the French-leaning operatic center of New Orleans witnessed the opera’s United States premiere in 1890.
The Metropolitan Opera staged the piece in 1922 with a starry cast under Albert Wolff (trained at the Opéra Comique). The vengeful sister Margared — in some ways vocally reminiscent of Weber’s Eglantine (Euryanthe) and Wagner’s Ortrud — is a Zwischenfach role that both lower- and higher-voiced singers can tackle. Refulgent soprano Rosa Ponselle alternated at the Met with contralto Jeanne Gordon, whom at least some critics preferred in the role. Frances Alda sang the gentle Rozenn; the women competed for the Mylio of then-newly arrived star tenor (and non-actor) Beniamino Gigli, rivaled by Giuseppe Danise as the macho warrior Karnac. Typically for the Met in most eras, the principal quintet yielded only one francophone singer, Léon Rothier, as the King. Lalo’s opera furnishes an excellent example of a title role not being the most important part; imagine that Wagner, instead of Lohengrin, had named his opera Henry the Fowler.
Le roi d’Ys has never established itself outside francophone countries, where today it remains a relative rarity. But it reappeared twice in New York in living memory. A 1985 Opera Orchestra of New York concert under Eve Queler drew better notices for Barbara Hendricks (Rozenn) and Alan Titus (Karnac) than for its francophone members. Leon Botstein’s 2008 American Symphony traversal at Avery Fisher Hall proved one of his best local offerings, with particularly memorable work from tenor Frédéric Antoun’s ideally deployed Mylio and Georgia Jarman’s sensitively sung Rozenn.
Bru Zane’s cast is rather lighter of voice than would be ideal for a large house revival, but all — including American mezzo-soprano Kate Aldrich and Dutch baroque soprano Judith van Wanroij, both long adept in French repertoire — offer the needed pleasure of the text. Admirably, this extends to the Hungarian chorus. The excellently schooled tenor Cyrille Dubois appears in almost every francophone recording project these days in a range of music from over four centuries and in multiple genres. It’s somewhere between a character and a leading-tenor sound. Mylio would be an ideal assignment for Benjamin Bernheim, who has excelled in the Talazac roles, but Dubois sings with a love of beauty and handles the text crisply.
Aldrich doesn’t wield volcanic power and occasionally strains slightly in high-lying phrases but gives a complete and idiomatic performance. Van Wanroij lends Rozenn timbral delicacy and graceful phrasing. As Karnac, a part in the vocally muscle-bound mold of Meyerbeer’s Nélusko (L’Africaine) or Bizet’s Escamillo, Jérôme Boutillier wields a strong, sonorous baritone very musically, with no hectoring. Another baritone, Christian Helmer, capably fills two small roles: Juhel, the royal steward, and — in an act-ending supernatural appearance worthy of Pope Leo in Verdi’s Attila — the local patron saint Corentin. (Sadly, the fifth-century monk’s status as patron saint of seafood does not figure in the plot.)
The cast’s sole (relative) weakness is the once solid, now unsteady and gray-voiced Nicolas Courjal, a bass whose handsomeness and longtime familiarity seem to deafen French producers and critics to his current tonal deficiencies. (Every national operatic industry has its equivalent phenomena.) As the king is meant to be elderly, he is not as much of a blot here as in playing Méphistophélès on John Nelson’s otherwise excellent La damnation de Faust recording. Overall, this Roi d’Ys proves very enjoyable.
