Customer Reviews

Bizet: Les Pêcheurs de Perles

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The "Pearls" is a most fortunate opera. Bizet would be pleased that this waif-child favorite of his has gotten such excellent recorded attention over the years. It's a beautiful thing: lovingly drawn characters with real dimension, the exotic setting, pages and pages of inspired music to match. Every one of the recorded representations of it has its salutory qualities...and this is another deep-cut jewel to add to the velvet box.

Rosenthal, like Paul Paray, was an illuminating and long-lived podium personality. He's quite elderly but very much present here. Sometimes he has to scoot things along to deal with the perfunctory machinations of a performance, something that he wouldn't have had to do if he'd been in the studio. His work is full of its usual felicities: an Italianate care of the singers, total command of florid passages, excellent aesthetics in scene and tone-building, a dramatic, colorful sense of orchestration. He was a maitre to be reckoned with and here he presides over a cast of singers we'll never hear the likes of again.

Maybe it's too many canned foods and too much Disney, but France doesn't produce its characteristic voices anymore. There are no more Vanzos or Bacquiers to sing like this, certainly no more Micheaus. It's a dead tradition. Thank the deities we have recordings of things like this or it would be like Monteverdi merely speculating about what the ancient Greeks sounded like.

Vanzo and Micheau are deeply affecting, probably getting more measure of their assignments than any of their confrers on record. Bacquier is commanding, gusting and fudging, but doing such an artistic job of it, it's no wonder Rosenthal lets him go. The orchestra is lovingly prepared and idiomatic and the ensemble is so good there's more than a whiff of the opera house, something studio presentations can't replicate.

I wouldn't junk my Pretre, Dervaux, Fournet, Leibowitz, they're all cherishable (especially Mattiwilda Dobbs with Leibowitz). All of them do M. Bizet proud. It's an embarassment of riches to have old Rosenthal's boat out on the bay, too.

This is wonderful. As the lovers, Vanzo and Micheau make a effortlessly beautiful couple and Baquier as Zurga also blends throughout the opera. Vanzo's tenor must be one of the 20th century's most beautiful voices: it's sweet and smooth, sometimes almost feminine, yet powerful when needed. This recording also captures the nerve of the drama (as far as it's possible with such a poor plot) - just listen to the second half of the famous Nadir/Zurga duet `au fond du temple sainte' (I could add a dozen more examples). And add to this the price. It's hard to get better singing so cheap, definately not possible concerning this complete opera.

The only things that stops me from giving this recording 5 stars is the sometimes badly balanced sound from the orchestra (coming from the fact that it's a live recording - although free from annoying sounds from the audience) and a few, but just a few, moments of uninspired conducting from Rosenthal. It's also a shame that the libretto isn't included, but at this price...

I think this recording wins over most of it's much more expensive competitors. EMI's coupling of Gedda/Micheau, for example, doesn't stand a chance - Gedda sounds dull & strained compared to Vanzo, and Blanc as Zurga is easily outshone by Baquier. Dont hesitate to buy this just 'cause it's so cheap and from an small label - the bigger label's productions can at their best make a draw with this recording - Noone defeats it.

A few french and Verdi arias sung by Vanzo are included as a bonus.

What a shame that the exquisite French style of singing and orchestral playing, so magnificently on display here, has become something of a lost art. I have owned six different recordings of this lovely little opera but, in the interest of shelf space (and sanity!), I recently decided to keep just two of them: this wonderful Rosenthal-conducted 1959 live performance, and the 1953 studio recording conducted by Jean Fournet.

The old Rene Leibowitz set (now on Preiser) featured fine conducting and the lovely Leila of Mattawilda Dobbs - but the tenor and baritone were not at the same level . The Dervaux was okay, but Gedda sounded too strenuous and Micheau was nowhere near as commanding as she is here with Rosenthal. I was more reluctant to let go of the Cluytens set - fine conducting, an excellent if small-voiced tenor (Legay), and the finest Zurga on records in Michel Dens (although Bacquier here is very nearly as good, if a trifle hammy). I also had the recent Plasson set, which offers the complete original text and modern recorded sound. Sadly, it is all downhill from there: the conducting is a bit wooden and unimaginative, the French orchestra lacks the wonderful billowing horns and fruity woodwinds of earlier French ensembles, and the singing - well, it's just not in the same league.

Fournet's set, with the old Orchestre des Concerts Lamoureux, is the best studio effort. The playing is richly old-fashioned, the great Leopold Simoneau is ineffably poetic, and his real-life wife Pierrette Alarie is a lovely small-scale Leila, a bit fragile but utterly charming. The only real weakness is Rene Bianco's rather wooly-voiced Zurga - but he has his heart in the right place, and his voice blends nicely with Simoneau's in the great duet scene. I cannot decide between the more subtly expressive singing of Simoneau (with Fournet) versus the refulgent beauty of Vanzo's higher tenor (with Rosenthal). What an embarrassment of riches to have them both!

Rosenthal has long been one of my favorite conductors - his recordings of Ravel, Debussy and Offenbach are non-pareil. The real surprise in this set, for me, is the stunningly gorgeous singing of Janine Micheau - this is one great performance!

If you love fine French singing and conducting done with heart and style, you really need to have both Fournet and Rosenthal. After all, aren't two Pearls always better than one?

Operas and singers have a national sound. For tenors, we here in North America almost always think of the rounded, passionate Italian sound or of the (often) less flexible, more direct sound (bark) of the German school. (My old teacher was certain that the Italian way was the was the ONLY way--not that I ever accomplished much along that line.)

To hear a French tenor such as Vanzo or Simoneau, in all his unearthly elegance for the first time is almost shocking. Once accustomed to the sound, however, one wonders how on earth we have allowed all those Italian bellowers to go about mucking up the French repertory.

Listen to Vanzo's very French take on some tenor warhorses in the recital portion of the second disk and hear how the great ones like Corelli and Bjoerling (not to mention the Pavarottis and Bocellis) got them wrong.

Alain Vanzo displays one of the sweetest, most beautiful tenor voices of all time in this lyric and moving opera by Bizet. He and Gabriel Baquier steal the show with their magnificent renditions of Nadir and Zurga. What a shame that there is no libretto. Still the music is among the most haunting and captivating you will ever hear. A small jewel, this one.....

I've just recently bought this opera and haven't yet managed to find the libretto with English translations on the internet so at the moment I'm a bit left in the dark when it comes to the understanding of the opera. However, what I do understand is that this recording is divine. Alain Vanzo, Jeanine Micheau and Gabriel Bacquir are all in wonderful voice. Especially Alain Vanzo possesses a voice which contains so much beauty; it's just so delicate, sometimes almost feminine sounding. Some of the arias are achingly beautiful and I can listen to them over and over again. Before buying this opera I listened to the different recordings on Amazon to find the most perfect one and when I came to this one my mouth just fell open with amazement when hearing "Au fond du temple saint", the duet with Gabriel Bacquir and I was unable to tear myself away from it. Listening to Bacquir singing is also pure pleasure.

It's almost unbelievable that this is a live recording from 1959; the sound is surprisingly good. The idea of adding bonus tracks to this recording featuring Vanzo singing operatic arias from other well-known operas, I find very attractive. His singing is absolutely wonderful.

The only complaint I have is the lack of libretto. Other than that this is a recording of the pearl fishers I can heartily recommend.

Source: 1959 live performance.

Sound: Good to very good mono, better than might reasonably be expected from a live performance of its time.

Documentation: No libretto. Brief summary of the plot. Track list.

Cast: Nadir - Alain Vanzo; Zurga - Gabriel Bacquier; Leila - Janine Micheau; Nourabad - Lucien Lovano. Conductor: Manuel Rosenthal.

Text: This is the familiar 1893 version of "Les Pecheurs de perles," assembled for the first French revivals of the opera after the composer's death. The good, grey Gramophone Magazine is pleased to call this version "discredited," since a critical text published in 1975 purported to restore the opera to Bizet's original form. The 1893 version is still, I believe, the one to which most people are accustomed. This is because the most obvious of the many changes involves the best known number in the show, the big tenor-baritone duet, "Au fond du temple saint." The familiar concert version of the duet, with its almost classical symmetry, is in fact from 1893. To hear the asymmetric version of 1863 for the first time is a shock, a quite unpleasant one, like taking an additional and unnecessary step off the end of a stairway.

Alain Vanzo re-recorded the part of Nadir nineteen years later, displaying small changes over the nearly two decades. His voice was a little brighter in 1959 and a little stronger in 1978. If his sense of drama was a little more finely honed in 1978, his performance is more smoothly blended into the conductor's vision of the operatic whole in 1959. (I saw Vanzo just once, as Faust. I had never heard of him and had no notion of what he was all about, but by the time the performance was finished, I believed he was the best French tenor in the whole, wide world. All these years later, I can name only Georges Thill and French Canadian Leopold Simoneau as rivals for that title.)

Soprano Janine Micheau, had more vocal power and greater dramatic oomph than Pierette Alarie, who had admirably recorded the part in 1953, but she could not match her predecessor's lieder singer delicacy or her wonderful agility of voice.

Recordings of "The Pearlfishers" have tended to be fortunate in the casting of the tenor and the soprano and dead unlucky with regard to the baritone. Zurga's long, soaring, exposed passages demand voices and training of a sort that have not been common for eighty years or more. The focused voice of that consummate pro, Gabriel Bacquier, offered a welcome exception to that rule. (Although I have not heard him in the part, I am happy to take the perceptive Mr. Lipscomb's assurance that the always fine Michel Dens is as good or even better.)

In reading Mr. Lipscomb's review, it struck that he was onto something when he wrote of reducing his collection to just two sets of "The Pearlfishers," this one and the 1953 set with Simoneau and Alarie, conducted by Jean Fournet. I am inclined to dismiss all the post-1975 recordings of the reconstructed 1863 version on the basis of text alone, but there is also the matter of the modern, international, one-size-fits-all style for both orchestras and singers. It seems to me that the sets of 1953 and 1959 represent the range of the traditional French style, its yin and yang. Fournet's "Pearlfishers" is elegant and precise as a Paris gown. Rosenthal's "Pearlfishers" is suave, self-assured and, oh, so Gallic.

I wrote about this set in January 2001 on the assumption that its merits were universally known, so I concentrated on praising the marvelous but under-appreciated tenor, Alain Vanzo. At the time, I was excessively concerned for the sensibilities of the delicate creatures who must have state-of-the-art DDD stereo clarity or suffer the vapors, so I gave it a beggarly four stars. I am no longer sympathetic to the quirks of hyper-refined audiophiles. This is a great performance. If ever a performance deserved five stars, this is it. This is the gem of Gala's tawdry crown, the thing that leads me to hope that some good may yet arise from that company's product line, despite a lengthy series of disappointments.

Little to add to the above except that I think I enjoyed the performance slightly less and the recorded sound much more -- for a live broadcast of this era it's really quite good. Alain Vanzo is very pleasant to listen to but don't expect him to sing all the high notes -- his voice is very light, falsetto -like. The attraction for me is the great Gabriel Bacquier, one of the all-timers of French lyric theater. Rosenthal, a veteran conductor, is even though undistinguished. At this price this is an absolute steal, especially with the finer Philips and EMI issues (led by Fournier andCluytens) both out of print in the US anyway. Cheap is good! Plus the bonus recordings on this label make for an even greater bargain, although the quality control over there in Portugal sometimes goes awry (I got two consecutive bad Elektras -- the great early Varnay recording, so had to settle for the lesser later one on Orfeo.)

I've had this since it first showed up and was looking for another when I found that the section for this was only recognizable by the artwork on top of the jewel box. If Amazon is reading this, the site needs to be corrected for someone who is really going to be confused.

This is some of the finest perfume.... the lyricism, the romance never flags... yet we have a buddy opera, more or less. I can't recommend this marvelous music too highly.

Nancy Eckert

I have not listened to this recording yet. However, from the other reviews listed here, it sounds like a great recording. Therefore, I am giving it five stars. One comment. How dare that person from Sweden accuse Nicolai Gedda of being strained and dull in the role of Nadir. Gedda was very comfortable with roles that had high tessituras. He was also dramatically committed to every role that he ever sang. He was always elegant and refined, never coarse. Others acted more passionately, but many of those also acted crudely. He never did. He was a great Huon in Weber's "Oberon", Benvenuto Cellini in Berlioz' opera of the same name, and Chapelou in Adam's "Le Postillon de Lonjumeau". He was also a great Arnold in the first recording of the French version of Rossini's "Guillaume Tell". He is also half Swedish.