This 70-plus-year-old recording has much to recommend it but still cannot be counted among the best or most alluring Manons on disc. Germaine Feraldy is a light-voiced Manon with a truly girlish glint in her sound. If you had to imagine a French soprano of her era, you would come up with her voice. She giggles her way through some of the very high, coloratura passages, but she also manages to be quite moving in the heroine’s darker moments. In her purely spoken moments, she lives in the character. Still, it’s not the most beautifully sung Manon available–Pilar Lorengar on Myto, Victoria de los Angeles on EMI, and even the darker Angela Gheorghiu (also on EMI) make lovelier sounds. And Beverly Sills (EMI again) is the most complete, simply perfect Manon, hands down.
Joseph Rogatchewsky is not French, but he has the style and ardency for the Chevalier de Grieux. His is a bigger-than-needed voice for the part and he strains above the staff. Henri Legay (with Angeles) is too light and Roberto Alagna too Italianate; Gedda with Sills is closer to the mark. But of them all, Rogatchewsky sounds the most crazy-in-love. The Lescaut of Georges Villier and Comte of Louis Guenot are colorful and believable, and if nothing else, the rest of the cast is brilliantly, idiomatically French.
Elie Cohen is the ideal Manon conductor, leading with a delicacy that never seeps into goopiness; his at-times very quick tempos may be due to the 78 rpm limitations, but I bet he’d be brisk without any recording strictures. The sound is pretty bad, but no worse than it is on the Malibran issue of this opera, and it’s less than half the price. This is imperfect in many ways, but it does capture the essence of the opera.
