Daniel-François-Esprit Auber (1782-1871)
Overtures Volume 8
Janáček Philharmonic Ostrava/Dario Salvi
rec. 2024, Kino Vesmír, Ostrava, Czech Republic
Naxos 8.574668 [77]
What an interesting series this has become! When it first came along, its portmanteau title Auber Overtures might perhaps have led one to anticipate just a couple of discs, probably focusing largely on old seaside bandstand favourites like Fra diavolo, Le cheval de bronze, Le domino noir and Les diamants de la couronne. Such an intention certainly seemed to be signposted by a very enjoyable, though, as it turned out, standalone initial release that featured the Orchestre de Cannes under Wolfgang Dörner (Naxos 8.573553). However, the subsequent relaunch of the series as a showcase for conductor Dario Salvi and a variety of Czech regional orchestras has confounded expectations by going on to deliver plenty of far more adventurously wide-ranging material. Three of its features have, indeed, been both unexpected and striking.
Firstly, the majority of the tracks on every one of the eight Salvi disc that have so far appeared have been world premiere recordings. They made up no less than 13 of the 16 tracks on Volume 1, 13/15 on Volume 2, 8/13 on both Volume 3 and Volume 4, 13/14 on Volume 5, 14/20 on Volume 6 and 6/11 on Volume 7. The latest release, Volume 8, continues that pattern for, of its 16 tracks, only four have been previously set down on disc.
A second unanticipated feature of the series has been its willingness to range surprisingly widely across the composer’s output. Had he stuck exclusively to Auber’s overtures – of which there are several dozen – Mr Salvi could easily have filled several CDs. Instead, however, rather than adhering rigidly to the series’ titular remit, he has also included on each release a selection of Auber’s entr’actes, divertissements, ballet music and miscellaneous other dances. Volume 2 even offered us an opportunity to hear the first recording of the composer’s early (1805) violin concerto.
Thirdly, the series has also included the odd piece of music by other composers who were in one way or another associated with Auber’s scores. Volume 5, for instance, gave us a Quadrille no. 2 sur l’opéra Zanetta de D.F.E. Auber by Philippe Musard, while Engelbert Humperdinck’s arrangement of the Le cheval de bronze overture may be found on volume 7. Meanwhile, Auber’s suitably showy reworking of Hortense de Beauharnais’s Partant pour la Syrie, promoted after its composer’s death to the status of an unofficial national anthem, brings the new volume 8 to a close.
Dario Salvi is well known as a conductor who specialises in unearthing and promoting long-neglected music, particularly from the second and third quarters of the 19th century, and this ongoing series seems to be something of a labour of love. As I have previously observed, the inclusion of at least one bridgehead track of already familiar material in any disc makes sound commercial sense and in the case of the volume under review we get it in the form of a delightfully articulated and balanced performance of the jaunty overture to Les diamants de la couronne. Even there, however, Mr Salvi confounds our expectations by throwing in that opera comique’s rarely encountered Act 2 sarabande. It’s an effective, stately piece that subverts our musical expectations, as we find a baroque musical form that had been most popular in the 16th and 17th centuries receiving a distinctly mid-19th century makeover – while being shoehorned into a story set in the 18th!
Such disregard of strict chronology was also an overall characteristic of the earlier discs in the Auber overtures series, where the order of individual tracks tended to hop apparently randomly backwards and forwards across time. Perhaps the aim was to create a more varied and artistically satisfying listening sequence, but some might argue that the otherwise unnecessary eschewal of chronological presentation prevents the listener from usefully appreciating how the composer’s style developed over the course of his career.
Volume 8 now becomes the first Auber/Salvi CD to present its contents in the order in which they were actually composed. Its first six tracks are dance numbers taken from Vendôme en Espagne, an 1823 one-Act opéra de circonstance written collaboratively by Auber and Ferdinand Hérold. Joint compositions, especially for ballets or dance sequences, were not particularly unusual at that time. Composers sometimes produced individual Acts within substantial, jointly-attributed works. Ludwig Minkus and Léo Delibes, for instance, each wrote 1½ Acts of the three-Act ballet La source (1866). At other times they were commissioned to compose individual numbers to be interpolated into a colleague’s, or even a rival’s, larger work – though the results were often unpredictable. Thus, the new numbers written by Minkus for an 1881 revival of Édouard Deldevez’s Paquita (1846) have actually gone on to become the ballet’s best-loved music, but the pas de deux that he was asked to write for Act 3 of Tchaikovsky’s Swan lake (1877) was never performed and has disappeared without trace. I cannot, however, immediately recall a piece of music where two composers shared out the work within brief individual numbers – except for Vendôme en Espagne. Thus, we find Auber writing the first half of the 6:52-long deuxième divertissement and Hérold the second. Similarly, the even shorter pas de charge – all of 4:35 in duration – was also parcelled out between them for some reason, with Hérold allocated the coda and Auber the recapitulation. How very strange… and yet how consistently pleasing the results turn out to be. Auber, too, must have been happy with his own part in the project, for he was to re-use some of the music from Vendôme’s overture, for which he had had taken sole responsibility, in his great 1830 success Fra diavolo.
The social-climbing comedy La fiancée is one of many Auber operas that have long been largely forgotten. Once again, its overture is a pleasing concoction, an amalgam of attractive tunes strung together in a fashion that’s simultaneously airy and jaunty (an adjective that’s so very difficult to avoid in this repertoire). Just as its canny composer intended, it certainly piques one’s interest in the rest of the opera – which, incidentally, Robert Ignatius Letellier, whose very useful booklet notes are a real asset to this series, considers a masterpiece, as well as exhibiting a good example of the feminist subtext that he has identified in several of the composer’s works. [For anyone wishing to pursue this idea further, I recommend Dr Letellier’s pioneering study of Leading themes in the operas of Daniel-François-Esprit Auber [Newcastle, 2024] in which he devotes a whole chapter to the concept of Enterprising womanhood and accords La fiancée’s heroine, Henriette, an honoured place as a “remarkably self-possessed and independently minded” character (op. cit., pp. 158-159)].
Auber’s L’enfant prodigue was, as its title suggests, based on the familiar parable of the prodigal son as told in the gospel of St Luke. Even though only one of the six tracks presented here has ever been recorded before in its original form, some listeners may nevertheless find the music somewhat familiar. That’s because in 1933 Constant Lambert arranged some of it to form the score of Frederick Ashton’s early and distinctly secular ballet Les rendezvous, in which various unnamed characters – a leading man, a leading lady, a group of girls, a gang of boys, a girl and two boys – meet in a park to socialise or, in the case of the soloists, to become rather better acquainted in an adage des amoureux. The music was thereafter recorded by both the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House/Robert Irving (for an HMV LP commemorating the silver jubilee of Sadler’s Wells Ballet in 1956) and the English Chamber Orchestra/Richard Bonynge (Decca Eloquence 482 7730 or as part of the invaluable 45-CD collection Richard Bonynge: complete ballet recordings [Decca 485 0781]).
Auber’s overture to L’enfant prodigue is the longest he ever wrote. A skilfully constructed amalgam of musical genres, some of its passages are replete with faux orientalist rhythms and orchestration while others are typical of well written – but essentially generic rum-ti-tum – mid-19th century music for dance. Given that L’enfant was the only piece Auber ever composed on a biblical subject, one might reasonably assume that it was an area that held little appeal for him, which might be the reason why the following sequence of five airs de ballet quickly jettisons any remaining trace of exoticism in favour of a joyful sequence of those light, tuneful melodies at which, as we know from this ongoing series of discs, Auber excelled. The fifth, climactic air is a particular foot-tapping charmer that would have captivated everyone from the Paris beau monde in the Salle de Peletier audience to the tradesmen whistling its catchy tune on the backstreets of Montmartre. The rapid and complete liberation of the music from any constraints imposed by its supposedly biblical setting is confirmed by the ease with which, three quarters of a century later, Constant Lambert was able to adapt it for an essentially plotless British ballet set in the era of that very modern social commentator Jane Austen.
At less than a minute and a half in length, Partant pour la Syrie is little more than an historical curiosity. Described at the time of its original composition as a romance avec accompagnement de piano, not even the repeated trumpet fanfares of Auber’s orchestration can transform it into a piece that’s particularly rousing. It’s not a patch on the Marseillaise and certainly wouldn’t inspire you to storm the Bastille. Nevertheless, it’s still good to hear it, for, as well demonstrated in an eight-disc collection released many years ago on the Marco Polo label, national anthems can sometimes offer uncannily accurate reflections of the regimes and societies they represent. As something of a fixture of Emperor Napoleon III’s regime – he was director of both the Paris Conservatoire and the imperial chapel throughout the whole reign – Auber was an appropriate choice to depict, in music, what historians retrospectively identify as the essentially silver-gilt superficiality of the Second Empire and the hollowness of its popinjay figurehead’s pretensions to military prowess.
Once again, Dario Salvi leads the players of the Janáček Philharmonic Ostrava through repertoire that, in most cases, must have been entirely unfamiliar to them. You would hardly realise that, however, while listening to their committed and completely idiomatic performances. They consistently exhibit a lightness of touch and a level of high-spirited animation that could not suit the music more effectively. The impressive results have, once again, been captured in warm, clear sound and with the greatest fidelity.
As you have gathered by now, this is a disc which does not – and does not seek to – plumb any great musical depths. Instead, it elegantly picks its way with a delectable and entirely appropriate sense of joie de vivre through a series of well-crafted and tuneful scores that are never less than entertaining bon-bons. As one or two of the previous volumes have demonstrated, once in a while Auber does aspire to something a little more ambitious. While that may not be so obviously apparent on this particular occasion, Dario Salvi’s latest release is, given all those world premiere recordings, a more than worthwhile addition to a series that is developing into something of a fascinating tour d’horizon of Auber’s orchestral output. In the troubled times through which much of the world is currently passing, it will also provide its listeners with a great deal of innocent yet very real and welcome pleasure.
Rob Maynard
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Contents
Daniel-François-Esprit Auber (1782-1871) and Ferdinand Hérold (1791-1833)
Vendôme en Espagne AWV 9 (1823) – overture (Auber) *
Vendôme en Espagne AWV 9 (1823) – pas de sept (Auber and Hérold) *
Vendôme en Espagne AWV 9 (1823) – deuxième divertissement (Auber and Hérold) *
Vendôme en Espagne AWV 9 (1823) – pas de charge (Auber and Hérold) *
Vendôme en Espagne AWV 9 (1823) – pas de trois (Auber) *
Vendôme en Espagne AWV 9 (1823) – finale (Hérold) *
Daniel-François-Esprit Auber (1782-1871)
Lafiancée AWV 17 (1829) – overture
Les diamants de la couronne AWV 34 (1841) – overture
Les diamants de la couronne AWV 34 (1841) – Act 2 sarabande
L’enfant prodigue AWV 41 (1850) – overture
L’enfant prodigue AWV 41 (1850) – introduction and Act 2 air de ballet no. 1 *
L’enfant prodigue AWV 41 (1850) – Act 2 air de ballet no. 2 *
L’enfant prodigue AWV 41 (1850) – Act 2 air de ballet no. 3 *
L’enfant prodigue AWV 41 (1850) – Act 2 air de ballet no. 4 *
L’enfant prodigue AWV 41 (1850) – Act 2 air de ballet no. 5 *
Hortense de Beauharnais (1783-1837), arr. for orchestra by D.-F. Auber (1782-1871)
Partant pour la Syrie (unknown date) *
*While the CD’s rear cover gives the impression that all 16 tracks on the disc are world premiere recordings, that is clearly not the case. There have, for instance, been multiple recordings of the Les diamants de la couronne overture over the years. I am grateful to Dr Letellier for confirming to me that just (!) 12 of the tracks are actually premiere recordings. They are identified in the above list by asterisks.
