Customer Reviews

Gluck: Armide

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

 

 

This is MY second Gluck's opera (after the French "Orphee et Euridice") and this set was a revelation to me. Minkowski, whose conducting was a major snag in his recording of Handel's "Ariodante", here appears to me as a real star of this magical show. It was a fascinating experience to me, a great Berlioz admirer, to finally find out why he was so fond of Gluck and to see how much Gluck's influence there is in Berlioz's music, especially in his early cantatas. Maybe it is Mireille Delunsch's wonderful voice which I know from a recording of Berlioz's cantata "Herminie" (with Herreweghe) that brings these comparisons to my mind. But it is first of all Minkowski's conducting, so colorfull and exciting that gives a "Berliozian" touch to this music. And what music it is! Throughout the set the singing is consistently delightful, with clear French pronuciation (from mostly native speakers). Mireille Delunsch as Armida is splendid and - contrary to what Stanley Sadie from "Gramophone" had to say about her performance (review in June 1999 p. 113) - she does make much use of her words as well as her impressive voice. As I said, I am a newcomer to Gluck and I have a long way to go before I can say that I know something about his operas, but this set certainly contaminated me with a "Gluckian" virus which I will not try to cure. And there is more Gluck to come from Minkowski...

To modern music lovers, Gluck is best-known for his Orpheus and Euridice and, to a lesser extent, for Alceste. But he was also the composer of other operas which deserve to be remembered. Among these operas is Armide, which Gluck composed in 1777 for the Paris Opera. (By that time, he had revised his earlier versions of Orpheus and Alceste for staging in Paris.) In setting Armide, Gluck took the liberetto written by Phillipe Quinault which had been used by the great French composer Lully in his opera, Armide, presented in 1686. Thus, Gluck was deliberately setting himself in competition with the earlier master. After Gluck's opera, other composers have set the Armide story, including Haydn in an opera and Brahms in a cantata, Renaldo.

This CD of Armide features the musicians of the Louvre conducted by Marc Minkowski and a distinguished cast of singers. Mr. Minkowski specializes in early music with an emphasis on scores and composers that have not received the attention they deserve. We are fortunate to have CD's readily accessible to explore Gluck's Armide. The work comes through in this release with intensity and passion.

Armide is a story of the power of love and of the war between love and hate. The heroine, Armide, is a sorceress who has just defeated an army of Christian crusaders. She values her freedom and declines to marry unless to a man who can defeat the crusader's hero, Renauld. In the course of the story, Armide casts a spell on Renauld to make him, for a time, love her. But, unfortunately for Armide, she falls in love with Renauld totally and unconditionally. Renauld is ultimately rescued and abandons Armide who bewails her loss mightily and destroys the magic palace she had built for herself and Renaud.

Gluck was known for attempting to integrate text and music into an artistic whole rather than for indulging in lengthy musical flourishes for their own sake. In Armide, he carries out his artistic programme in part. But there are long sections of dances, musical interludes, and scenes that have little dramatic intensity and which run counter to Gluck's austure style of composition. This is probably due in part to Gluck's decision to use, without editing, the early liberetto by Quinault which had been adopted to the different compositional style of Lully. (In the years between Lully and Gluck, some composers had tried to eliminate various portions of Quinault's text to speed-up the action. But Gluck took the original liberetto.)

Gluck's Armide is not often performed today, but it is a treasure. The heroine, Armide, is a great multi-faceted role with arias expressing the extremes of passionate love and deep hatred. The role is beautifully performed on this CD by Mirelle Dellunsch. There is a character in the opera titled "hate", -- hate personified with lengthy arias worthy of the Queen of the Night -- performed guttily and intensely by Ewa Poodles. Charles Workman is an effective Renauld, but this music belongs to the women leads.

The first and fifth acts of Gluck's Armide move with swift intensity while some of the more relaxed material is in act two and, particularly, in act four. For me, the most powerful musical moment of this score comes at the end of the opera in Armide's aria "La Perfide Renaud" which shows her fury at her abandonment by Renaud. Also in Act 5 is a beautiful duet between Armide and Renauld and an "Air Sicilien" featuring the solo flute. The scenes with Hate are stunning.

Gluck's Armide is a grand opera by a great composer. It will delight listeners willing to be adventurous as well as lovers of opera, early classical music, and passionate music. It is a joy to have this work available.

Having long admired Gluck, the one opera that was missing from my collection was "Armide," but I was not certain if this recording would bring out the dramatic side of his music. (So many modern, "historically-informed" performances of his music don't.) Upon listening, however, I felt that although the singers presented herein are mostly smaller-scale Handelians and Mozartians, they do indeed bring out some of the flavor of this fascinating work.

Unlike Gluck's "Alceste" or "Iphigenie en Tauride," "Armide" is less stark, less strophic, more melodic. One might almost describe it as "radical Mozart." Gluck seemed to be purposely striving here for an opera that was both inherently (which is to say, musically) dramatic and yet tuneful. The result is a delightful work in which recitatives, arias, ensembles and choruses slip seamlessly one into the other, much like the works of his Italian successor, Spontini.

Mark Minkowski drives this performance with incredible intensity from first note to last, and his singers are for the most part able and up to the task. Mirielle Delunsch and Charles Workman were particularly delightful, though the female supporting singers were likewise superb. Their voices are not only pretty and well-supported, but they understand the French style and have the characteristic "French vibrato" which adds to the color of the work. I was particularly struck by Renaud's lyrical, entrancing aria by the side of the stream, with its sparse yet piquant orchestration.

In 1909 Toscanini revived this opera at the Met with Olive Fremstad and Enrico Caruso, two singers known for having cannon-sized voices. I wonder how good it really was, though of course Fremstad was a real artist and capable of almost anything. Nevertheless, the opera did poorly at the box office, not because audiences thought it was tuneless but because it didn't have any held high notes for either principal. A pity; they definitely missed the point of this opera. Nevertheless, I only give this recording four stars instead of five because I would have liked a more dramatic and fully-delineated character out of Delunsch, and because some of the male supporting singers range from just acceptable to dreadful.

It's possible to get a strong sense that this opera improves as it goes along. That's been my own experience with it, but it's not so easy to account for why. The best I can come up with is that it's not the performance that gives me this feeling but partly the music itself and above all the libretto.

The story seems to me to break cleanly into two distinct parts, the second part starting at act IV. From this point on we have abandoned Damascus and Christian armies and been spirited away to an enchanted island. Apart from the two principals Armide and Renaud (Rinaldo) acts IV and V have an almost completely new cast from the previous acts, and Armide has changed roles from being a powerful sorceress to being just another heroine spurned in love, a kind of downmarket Dido who finally just magicks herself away leaving the rest of them to their own devices, the Christian armies that the earlier acts were supposed to have been about literally nowhere. This in turn highlights two separate sides of the composer's personality - the dramatist and the composer of tableaux. He excelled in both capacities, but it may have been a bit much to expect him to switch from the former role (in the earlier acts) to the latter within the limits of a single work. Gluck was a musical rationalist and reformer, but also a musical politician and in-fighter, and I suspect that in Armide the two sides to his musical personality come into conflict to a certain extent, with the tableau-composer coming out on top. Keen to establish himself in Paris, he took over the traditional libretto used by Lully, involving a lot in the way of ballet-music and set-pieces in the later acts. Whether he would have done this given a freer hand and fewer entrenched interests to placate, I rather doubt. On the other hand, he was very good at that sort of thing, and I feel simply that his best inspiration belongs in these later acts, the gem of the whole work being a long aria for Renaud. This is not to say that there is not a lot of fine stuff in acts I-III as well, the jewel of those being another aria for Renaud, just that these acts are not, by and large, quite the greatest Gluck.

The challenge for the interpreters, on this view, is how to handle the first three acts. The excellent liner-essay tells us about a performance from Toscanini that failed, seemingly because the performers tried to ham up the music as if it were Verdi. If so, that was asking for disaster - this music is not at that kind of voltage, and Minkowski knows better than to treat it as if it were. Taking it for what it is, I would say they all do a first-class job. The cast are largely francophone, and the two Americans sing their French very convincingly too, which is particularly important in the case of Workman as Renaud as he seems to me to get the best music in the entire opera. The direction throughout shows admirable taste and sense of proportion - the demons for instance are very urbane and well-behaved demons, the kind of demons you could safely invite to dinner, and I am astonished that Gluck doesn't try to make any kind of effect out of the diamond shield. Brahms is not known as a musical dramatist and his Rinaldo is one of his less-performed works, but his treatment of the moment in Goethe's text when the diamond shield is displayed is simply awesome.

We are in safe hands with Minkowski in music of this period. Period instruments are of course used, and the scale of the performance is judged exactly. If the earlier acts seem less dramatic than they might have been, my feeling is that that is down to the music not to the performers, who know what to avoid. Armide is not Gluck's greatest work, but it's very fine one and this is a set I wouldn't have wanted to miss. To what extent it will suit other listeners I have no way of knowing, but I have tried to make coherent sense of how it all comes across to me.

On first listening, Gluck seems awfully insubstantial. Part of the problem is the composer's style. Without da capo arias like Handel operas, there is little opportunity for that probing self-examination that some recent great recorings (like Minkowski's own Ariodante) have brought out. And while tuneful, the music suffers by comparsion with Mozart who knew how to make the most of every melody with fully realized songs. Armide with its arias that slip frictionlessly into recetatives, duets, and trios is harder to grasp. But repeated listening brings out the beauties, more like hothouse orchids than the sturdy blooms of Handel or Mozart, Give Minkowski immense credit for making this music so enjoyable and rewarding; in lesser hands it would be simply dull. As far as the singers are concerned, they are lovely and clear, and the estimable Ewa Podles contributes a lot of power in the cameo of La Haine. My one complaint, is a lack of raw passion at some crucial moments, especially from Armide herself. The soprano, Mirielle Delunsch, never really shows the wilder emotions appropriate to the character. On the other hand, her impeccable rendering of such songs as the tender aria, "Ah! Si La LIberte Me Doit Etre Ravie" had me replaying that track over and over. One note: the fourth act, which seems to be an excuse for ballets and lacks the two principals, is a bit of a bore.

Breathtaking, brilliant and hard driving orchestration, extraordinarily beautiful singing. It is almost as terrific as Gluck's masterpiece (no, not Orfeo, good as that is) but Iphegenia in Taurus. I love Mozart but can't fathom why Gluck isn't almost as popular.

The 1996 Minkowski recording of this, Gluck's fourth opera for Paris, has languished on my shelves for years without my feeling much impulse to revisit it. The reappearance of Richard Hickox' 1982 version gave me good cause to find out why; straight away I discovered what was missing from Minkowski's account: a sense of urgency, tension, a proper acknowledgement of the searing passions seething in Armide's breast and the underlying "edginess" that must lurk beneath the declamatory grandeur of Gluck's stately music.

Gluck's desire was to escape Baroque formalism and deliver a more direct, unadorned emotionalism. Minkowski seems to me to be stuck in a more sedate past in his handling of the score. His default position is the cliché adopted by all conductors bereft of ideas: take the slow passages VERY SLOOOW then go hell for leather in the fast sections. His direction is otherwise rhythmically inert as we veer between stasis and scramble. Urgency is not conveyed by being frenetic. It perhaps doesn't help that the Baroque pitch of A=403 is used; being two thirds of a tone down on standard modern concert pitch definitely takes the edge off things. You have only to compare some of the more dramatic moments with Hickox' taut, flexible direction to hear the difference; one such is the final scene, which brings me to the deficiencies in Minkowski's singers as compared with Hickox' stellar cast - stellar, with one notable exception, that is.

The lack of excitement in his conducting is compounded by Minkowski's voices: Mireille Delunsch has a light, flickering, attractive mezzo but her relatively small and unvaried tone is as nothing compared with Felicity Palmer's big, handsome voice. Yes, she has her squally moments - she was in the process of making the transition from the soprano to the mezzo tessitura and is at times awkward, but the sheer intensity and scale of her assumption of the role at times are reminiscent of Callas, as is her ability to shade dynamics and colour her tone. Comparison of that last scene provides a conclusive illustration of the difference between them; Palmer's conflict and despair are gripping, Delunsch sounds mildly inconvenienced. Minkowski generally has lighter, less characterful voices at his disposal with the notable exception of the great Ewa Podles' "La haine" - not that Hickox' Linda Finnie is in any sense inadequate in that role but Podles engineers a typical tour de force compared with Finnie's more conventional singing. Tenor Anthony Rolfe Johnson clearly has a major voice compared with Charles Workman and does a reasonable facsimile of a French haut-contre tenor; generally the smaller parts are much better filled for Hickox, including lovely contributions by Keith Lewis, Sally Burgess and Marie Slorach in the two successive trios in Act 4. Minkowski's singers are nowhere near so beautiful. The big exception is Hickox' Hidraot, which lies too high for Raimund Herincx at this stage of his career and his contribution is, I'm afraid, at times comically strained and wobbly. Fortunately, it's a small part; Minkowski's Laurent Naouri is much smoother of voice but also typically bland compared with Herincx' game blustering.

EMI provide a synopsis and one of those annoying libretti on a fourth CD ROM; Archiv includes a conventional booklet with a libretto but Minkowski's edition permits cuts in the dance music. I know which one I shall be keeping and listening to when I want to enter Gluck's strange fantasy world of magic spectacle and psychological verisimilitude.

Gluck wrote his first operas as the Baroque Era was dying. He created a new style of more straightforward expression. For many years this was read by interpreters as a call to deliver his vocal lines with an oratorio like seriousness. The result could be deadly dull. In more recent years, "Early Music" interpreters have tried to enliven Gluck's musical language. The right combination of style, expression and voice is hard to achieve.
Watching a poor quality private DVD of a performance from Spain starring Montserrat Caballe, I fell in love with ARMIDE and thought that I had to have an audio recording. The performance with Melanie Delunsch and conducted by Marc Minkowski is the only one available. There had been another with Felicity Palmer which is long out of print.
It is almost as if one is listening to a different opera chez Caballe and chez Delunsch. Minkowski's singers are just fine (Delunsch has a lovely voice), and he keeps a lively pace, but somehow the performance misses the excitement achieved by the Spanish ensemble. When the character "La Haine" (literally "hatred" personified) shows up in the third act, as interpreted by Ewa Podles, I thought FINALLY, somebody who is actually singing with some sense of drama !
The elusive borderline world of Gluck is not quite achieved here. Minkowski weighs in a little too closely to the Baroque end of the spectrum. I hear too much Lully and Rameau in the performance and not enough of what made Gluck new and unique.
The sound recording is excellent, and there are very good booklet notes, a full text and translation.

It seems to be the general consensus that Armide, while quite good, is not Gluck's strongest work. While that could be true, it certainly is my favorite opera by that composer, and it is extraordinarily performed here. When I bought this, I had was not overly familiar with Gluck's works, having heard 'Paride ed Elena', which is a masterpiece in itself, and is perhaps the most "French" of all of Gluck's Italian operas, as well as the somewhat uninspired recording of 'Iphigénie en Tauride' done by Boston Baroque and Pearlmann. I was also, at that time, unfamiliar with the operas of Lully, Rameau, and even Handel. This, however, inspired me to look into those composers, and now, I would say, after hearing other works by Gluck, that this is the closest work by him to those of French composers, such as Rameau and Francoeur. But there are some significant differences, namely that unlike Francoeur, with whom Gluck differed only sixteen years in age, Gluck followed the neoclassical model of composition, as opposed to the baroque/rococo styles of Francoeur, Rameau, and Mondonville, another French composer of that time. This never actually occurred to me until I heard the recent recording of Francoeur's opera 'Pirame et Thisbé', which was originally composed in 1726, but revived in 1771, six years before Armide saw its premiere. And yet that work is perhaps closer to Gluck's opera than anything by Rameau. But there is a significant gap, and it would be nice to hear those works which fill it, although there might not be any hope of that. Anyway, Armide is quite different from anything by Gluck that I've heard, and I don't seem to know where to look for anything else quite like it. However, if you enjoy Lully, Rameau, or any other French baroque composers you may well like this. But it also seems something like Mozart in a very bizarre way, but significantly less so than 'Orfeo ed Euridice' or 'Iphigénie en Aulide'. And it does make one regret that Gluck didn't set other libretti by Quinault, such as 'Atys' or 'Persée'.

Gluck - Armide / Delunsch, Workman, Naouri, Podles, Beuron, Polegato, Kozená, Les Musiciens du Louvre, Minkowski is a recording under the direction of Marc Minkowski who leads rge Les Musiciens De Louvre on this Deutsche Grammophon GmbH recording from 1999. The booklet contains 124 pages. Mario Armellini has written a very well-written essay called "'Armide' or Le chevalier Gluck and the tradition of tragedie lyrique'" and short synopsis. It also contains short biographies of the performers and the conductor. The lyrics are available in English, French and German.It also contains some fine drawings of the Gluck, Lully and Tasso. Recommended. 4/5.