The booklet photos and caricatures in Cascavelle’s 2-disc André Messager tribute depict him as the ultimate dandy, the boulevardier and wildly successful composer of operettas. But he also was a serious musician, a composer who turned out well-crafted ballets, hit shows, and operas. He was a sought-after conductor of Strauss and Wagner operas who also championed his younger contemporaries like Milhaud and Poulenc and served as music director of Covent Garden and the Paris Opera. He’s best known today for his stage works, and the well-chosen excerpts from eight of them cover a range of attractive material, from love duets to snappy patter songs.
Disc 1 focuses on La Belle Époque–four pre-World War I operettas–and Disc 2 offers four written the 1920s. The 53 arias and duets involve more than 40 singers, almost all recorded in the late 1920s or early 1930s. Some of the singers have faded into obscurity, such as soprano Lemichel du Roy, who’s a scintillating presence in selections from Véronique, as well as Georgette Simon, who does the same in La Basoche, and Yoshiko Miakawa, a Japanese soprano who sang Puccini’s Madame Butterfly in a 1931 l’Opèra-Comique production, here singing an aria from Madame Chrysanthème, Messager’s opera of the same story that premiered a decade before Puccini’s.
And there are plenty of singers here whose luster is undimmed–Georges Thill, David Devriès, Miguel Villabella, Ninon Vallin, Germaine Feraldy, the under-appreciated Leila Ben Sidora, and the ageless Lucien Fugère, who recorded a delicious little ditty from La Basoche at the age of 80. But the set is effectively stolen by the incomparable Yvonne Printemps, featured in three excerpts from L’amour masque, whose energy and vivacity leap from the speakers.
The music is delightful, and there’s tremendous interest in hearing just about all of the artists singing music in a style that’s in their bones and in their throats. Their ease with parlando, nasal pronunciations, clarity of the words, and forward vocal placement are stylistic essentials virtually absent from today’s singers in this music. Cascavelle’s handsome booklet includes plentiful photos, synopses of the operettas, easy-to-follow track information (all, alas in French), and a brief bi-lingual potted bio of the composer and recording history of the works. Less worthy are the transfers, plagued by distortion at climaxes, occasional questionable pitch choices, and shrillness beyond the typical acidic tang of French sopranos of the period, perhaps due to overzealous de-noising that creates frequency peaks that make many tracks so frustrating to hear. It’s a pity that so worthy an effort has been so needlessly sabotaged.
