Massenet Ariane Amina Edris; Kate Aldrich, Jean-François Borras, Jean-Sébastien Bou, Julie Robard-Gendre; Munich Radio Orchestra; Bavarian Radio Choir/Laurent Campellone Bru Zane BZ1053 163:21 mins (3 discs)
In 1906 after a 12-year hiatus Massenet returned to the Paris Opéra with Ariane, for which the poet Catulle Mendès devised a suitably grandiloquent five-act scenario, set in front of the Cretan labyrinth, a palace on Naxos, with a full-sized galley and a sea for Ariadne to drown herself in as Theseus sails on to Athens with her sister Phaedra, who in this version has been rescued from the murky depths of the underworld.
This is sumptuous late Massenet, as well upholstered musically as a gilded fin-de-siècle canapé and intending to bend Wagner to French ways. So dark Nordic myths are exchanged for the sunlit Mediterranean and a reimagined Tristan und Isolde for Ariadne and Theseus in their Act 2 duet. If the sea is sometimes less wine red than Cornish grey green, there’s even a hint of the Valkyrie’s riding in the Prelude to Act 5.
Laurent Campellone undoubtedly believes in Massenet’s score, coaxing fine playing from the Munich Radio Orchestra, particularly the woodwinds. It is unmistakably Massenet, replete with rich orchestral colour and headily perfumed eroticism. But, frankly, the libretto limps after the second act.
The singers do their best: Amina Edris as Ariane truly magics the ear and Jean-François Borras’s Théseé is tough and tortured and a properly French tenor. Kate Aldrich’s Phèdre is not ideal with a burr to the less than full-toned voice, but Julie Robard-Gendre’s Perséphone queens it admirably over the Underworld, a chamber of horrors in Mendès’s libretto. But then there is something of the waxworks about the whole piece.
Christopher Cook