
Having rather enjoyed Roussel’s orchestral music, I figured it made sense to try his opera
Padmâvatî. Surely the lovely, lush writing displayed in the symphonies would reappear. And so it does. But.
First to the suitably operatic story. Lucky Indian regent of some sort Ratan-Sen is married to the exquisitely beautiful Padmâvatî. She so smokin’ hot that she keeps covered, presumably to prevent men from going bonkers upon seeing her. Or something like that. Then the Mogul leader Alaouddin bursts on the scene. He’s been told of Padmâvatî’s legendary beauty, and he wants to see for himself. After some cajoling, he gets to see her. Yep, she’s smokin’. And so Alaouddin goes bonkers. He wants her. There will be war. Shenanigans ensue. Ratan-Sen ends up dying, and the heroine commits suttee at his funeral. So the story is there.
The music is there, too. It’s lush. It’s beautiful. It’s “exotic,” or at least it’s a Frenchman’s slightly impressionistic take on music of the mysterious East. The winds are deployed quite nicely, and the strings are quite fine. There’s some nice wordless choir work, and then the choir will repeatedly call out for Shiva, and there’s dance music, and so on. It’s a fully formed stage work. Some of the music veers into a modern realm, but more in a Debussy than a Schoenberg kind of way. Nothing surprising so far.
Now to the singing, playing, conducting, sound. EMI used marquee names for the three main roles. Marilyn Horne is the title character, and she does well so far as I can tell. Nicolai Gedda is Ratan-Sen, and if perhaps he doesn’t sound like he’s at his peak here, he’s still nice. Jose Van Dam fits the role of Alaouddin well. Michel Plasson and his French orchestra (from Toulouse) both do well, creating lovely sounds and playing in a secure manner. The early digital sonics are better than the recording date (1983 as far as I can tell) would suggest.
The issue for me is the work as a whole. Such a dramatic story deserves more intensity, or at least a more vibrant overall feel. Maybe it’s the performance, maybe it’s the score, I don’t know. It just never really catches fire for me. Even though it’s relatively short (under two hours), the time doesn’t fly by. Rather, beautiful moments come and go, and less compelling stretches fill the gaps. It’s not
bad, not at all, but it doesn’t measure up to even Leo Delibes’
Lakme, to choose a similar work. Perhaps Christoph Eschenbach can be persuaded to conduct the work, given his success (for me) in the orchestral works of the composer. As it is, this is a disappointment for me. The lack of an English language libretto, even online, didn’t help.