Customer Reviews

Sacchini - Oedipe à Colone (Opera in 3 Acts) / Loup, Paulin, Getchell, Boutté, Blaise, Opera Lafayette, Brown

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

 

 

Review coming shortly...

2cds of interesting late-Classical opera from Opera Lafayette under Ryan Brown; generally an all-round success. Following on from an excellent Gluck "Orphee et Euridice" French version also on Naxos (and highly recommended), Opera Lafayette shed light on a definite unknown - which is worth lighting up. Period instruments used, and good singing.

Recommended.

I bought this recording because I saw several La Fayette Opera performances at the University of Maryland. The ansamble usually presents lesser known early operatic works and is always excellent. If you like early opera, you can't go wrong with this one. Highly recommended and enjoyable.

The Opera Lafayette and Ryan Brown can pretty much do no wrong in my book, and I've become a big fan in the last couple of months. The Washington D.C.-based company is always looking for less well known baroque and classical repertory, and this interesting choice is a spirited smaller opera by a composer, fairly successful in his time, who is now somewhat ignored. I won't say that this work, supposedly Sacchini's best (based, of course, on Sophocles' "Oedipus at Colonus") will spark a Sacchini revival, but it's a quality piece, superior to Haydn, equal to Salieri, but not exactly Da Ponte Mozart. It's a bit frothy for the Sophoclean subject, but that's not surprising for a 1787 opera (tragically, Sacchini dindn't live to see the premiere in Paris). For me the work's biggest problem is the lack of any memorable arias, though the soloists do quite well with what they have. As usual, material such as this on Naxos is a titanic bargain.

One internet reviewer compares Oedipe a Colone to Salieri's Les Danaides, my favorite opera of the 1780s; and another to Mozart's Idomeneo, my favorite Mozart opera. So it reinforces a fine tradition. All three operas are based on serious classical myths, the noblest class of subject matter ever to receive operatic treatment. The taste for such themes collapsed under the weight of nascent democracy, leading to a preference for comic opera and then works like Carmen and La Boheme, brilliant in style but base in theme. Every opera such as Oedipe a Colone to reappear on stage or CD is a cultural triumph no matter what the quality of performance as long as it is adequate and representative.

The music of Oedipe is perhaps more polite than challenging; but that politeness is the period style of the 1780s. Opera did not turn really violent until Cherubini's Medee in 1787 when the Revolution was an accomplished fact. Sacchini's politeness is analogous to genteel and ingratiating radio commercials in the 1940s before Presley unleashed his hound dog. The plot of Oedipe brings back to the stage King Theseus, a major player in Rameau's great Hippolyte et Aricie. It strikes me as somewhat unusual that the first voice we hear is a tenor. In fact both Theseus and his guest, the central character Polynices, are sung by tenors. In 19th century opera, tenor heroes are usually held back for dramatic entrances like Verdi's troubador singing offstage. With typical dignity, Theseus refers to his soldiers as "braves compagnons de mes nobles travaux." A herald addresses them as "protecteurs de l'Etat et defenseurs des rois." Less than a decade later there were no soldiers left to defend Louis XVI. Significantly Marie Antoinette failed in her attempt to promote this opera; and Sacchini died the following year; so he did not have to witness what was going to happen to her and her husband.