Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Massenet: La Navarraise; Bartók: Bluebeard's Castle

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

This month's lyric theater programming gets under way with a double bill of short masterpieces.

First, comes Jules Massenet's La Navarraise (1894), which in two brief acts sets forth a tragic tale of love in wartime. The scene is the Basque Country in Northern Spain at the time of a nineteenth century Spanish internal conflict. Amid all the bloodshed of battle "The Girl from Navarre" commits a murder for the love of her soldier boy. Going back to the 1960's we had two recordings of La Navarraise in our WWUH classical music record library. I chose the one on a single 1975 RCA Red Seal LP for broadcast on Sunday, September 18, 1988. It featured American mezzo Marilyn Horne as the girl and tenor Placido Domingo as the young soldier. Our station acquired a 2018 Warner Classics compact disc release of this opera which stars tenor Roberto Alagna as Sargeant Araquil, opposite soprano Aleksandra Kursak as Anita. Alberto Veronesi directs the Opera Orchestra of New York and the New York Choral Ensemble.

Massenet's orchestral scoring for La Navarraise is very colorful and calls for various special effects. The opera opened in London to much applause, but enthusiasm for it dwindled every time it reappeared on stage in the years leading up to World War I. The great Geraldine Ferrar had it revived one last time at the Met in 1921 as a vehicle for her vocal artistry. Like so many other Massenet operas, this one passed into oblivion thereafter. You listeners can now rediscover the beauty and passion of Massenet's Episode Lyrique, a little gem of the French operatic heritage. The new CD recording was originally scheduled to go over the air on Sunday, January 27, 2019. Its broadcast had to be postponed until this Sunday.

Béla Bartók's one and only opera is called in his native language A kékszakállú herceg vára, but it is known to the world as Bluebeard's Castle (1918) and is the composer's musically expressionistic rendering of Perrault's fairy tale. Bartók's colleague Zoltán Kodály is quoted as saying it is "sixty minutes of dramatic intensity." Once regarded as unperformable, it's now considered a twentieth-century classic. Bartók did not want his creation to be taken at the level of a simple minded story about a monstrous ladykiller. Like Adonis of ancient legend, Duke Bluebeard is a lover who suffers.

For such a dark and difficult work, Bluebeard's Castle has been fairly frequently recorded. I've aired four different interpretations of it on disc going back to 1984. The most recent one I broadcast on Sunday, May 9, 2010 and I present it again today. It was issued through LSO Live, the proprietary label of the London Symphony Orchestra, and was recorded in state-of-the-art twenty-irst century sonics, live in performance in 2009 at the LSO's home venue, the Barbican auditorium, with Valery Gergiev directing. Bass baritone Willard White is Bluebeard. His latest wife Judith is mezzo Elena Zhidkova. Sung in the original Hungarian.