This collection presents 14 excerpts from French opera and concert music by Herold, Thomas, Massenet, Offenbach, Chabrier, and others. Most of it is effervescent music that should bubble over and lift your spirits in anticipation of a great show or send you out into the night whistling a good tune. In other words, these are bracing curtain raisers and encores. Yan Pascal Tortelier’s heavy handed performances don’t give you much to sing about, however, sounding more Teutonic than Gallic. Paul Paray was a master at this sort of repertoire and his recordings of most of it are still available with the Detroit Symphony on various Mercury Living Presence CDs. It is perhaps enlightening to note that for each overture Paray’s performances run about 40 seconds less than Tortelier’s. Paray is aided by bright, open, well-balanced sound with all-important crisp percussion; moreover, the Detroit Symphony of that day had one of the finest woodwind sections ever assembled, a claim that is not likely to be leveled at the BBC Phiilharmonic. The sound afforded Tortelier is wooly, and the percussion is murky and remote. Perhaps these readings would do in the concert hall, but when you are buying a recording for repeated listening, why not get the best. And oddly enough in this French repertoire, it seems best to “buy American”.
