Francis Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmelites is pretty much a director-proof opera, at least on the evidence of live recordings of staged productions. The opera, which the tres gay Poulenc set to his own libretto, makes an unabashed pitch for audience sympathy, and inevitably gets it. Story: during the French Revolution, a convent of Carmelite nuns struggles to survive external evil as well as the enormous challenges of cloistered life. At the end, the devoted, officially condemned, if not quite Sound of Music-material nuns bravely march off to the guillotine one by one, their choral "Salve Regina" diminished by one voice at each drop of the off-stage blade. Political repression; religious martyrdom; heads rolling: theatrically, what could possibly go wrong?
But it's a talky piece �" hence its title �" and with anything less than a cast of superb singing actors, it can have its longueurs on that tortured trajectory to the guillotine. Oliver Py's production, recorded live at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in 2013 (Erato, two DVDs), has, to the last cast member, those singing actors and is the most sensitive, least sensational Dialogues I've seen. I've hated previous Py productions, particularly the garish Lulu with added grotesqueries. But here the director, like Poulenc a self-identified gay Roman Catholic, is on the composer's wave-length and keeps the stage pictures uncluttered and the action unexaggeratedly ritualistic while drawing keen, individual performances from his cast.
San Francisco Opera's history with the piece is distinguished. In 1957, general director Kurt Herbert Adler gave Dialogues its US premiere under Erich Leinsdorf, with a star-studded cast that included a debuting Leontyne Price as Madame Lidoine. Price returned in the part in 1982, when Regine Crespin, who created the role of Madame Lidoine in the Paris premiere in 1957, sang a searing Madame de Croissy, the abbey prioress whose death scene at the end of the first act is, in less fortunate productions, a peak from which the drama prematurely falls. Crespin's blasphemous rage at the pain, and God, may still be echoing in the War Memorial.
There's no one quite so formidable in Py's cast, but the women singing lead roles are Francophone, for which there is no good substitute, and they sing their native tongue with supple authority. As an ensemble, I actually prefer this cast: Patricia Petibon (Py's overparted Lulu) a wide-eyed, impulsive, complicated yet thoroughly involving Blanche; Sophie Koch a commanding Mother Marie fully up to the increasing lead she takes throughout the opera; Veronique Gens a superbly focused Madame Lidoine; and Sandrine Piau a Sister Constance far above the feather-brain many directors make her. They're all singers who cut their teeth on early music and Mozart, and now, consequently, sing with rich, saturated tone embellished with only sparing but expressive vibrato.
The same is true with Topi Lethipuu's fine-grained Chevalier de la Force. Rosalind Plowright is a stern Madame de Croissy, but the character's deep, personal sympathy for Blanche comes through potently, and her death scene, filmed vertiginously from above, is a harrowing but nuanced mini-drama.
I've been lucky with the piece onstage and always conceded its power in the theater, but I haven't loved the work (or Poulenc) as I might have. Sometimes the music seems to approach Debussy or Tchaikovsky in compositional craft, only then, Puccini-like, to slide off into banality (though a better composer for the nuns' fervent, fragrant liturgical music is unimaginable). Also, the story depicts all too well what for me are the creepiest aspects of Catholicism. But this urgent, ideally proportioned performance, beautifully sung and incisively conducted by Jeremie Rhorer (with the Philharmonia Orchestra) has completely won me over.
French Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine underwent a significant style change when he left his wife to become the lover of Arthur Rimbaud �" and another when, post-Rimbaud, he converted to Catholicism. You have to wonder, given the converts, if the Church of Rome infused French drinking water. Verlaine's verse, in that range of styles, has supplied the texts for more French chansons �" and songs by Britten and others �" than those of any other poet. Countertenor Philippe Jaroussky brilliantly shows how many, and how variously, in a fascinating new two-CD set, Green (Erato). A kind of follow-up on his earlier CD Opium , it also pays subtle tribute to absinthe, another source of Verlaine's inspiration.
Other countertenors have recorded chansons, with only mild success in my book, but Jaroussky, now at the top of his game, makes the enterprise work, sometimes highly affectingly. Part of the secret is that his unusually high falsetto often does sound like a female soprano; when I first spun the disc, I thought I'd put in the wrong CD and was listening to a French soprano whose voice I couldn't recognize. It's a sound that seldom gets matronly and has the requisite perfume.
But it's the savvy programming �" there are no composer groups, or even groups of settings of the same poems �" that keeps the listening varied and fascinating. Wait until you hear Charles Tenet's saucy "Verlaine (Chanson d'automne)." His colleagues �" pianist Jerome Ducros, the Quatuor Ebene and (openly lesbian) mezzo Nathalie Stutzman �" help give the material its essential elevation, and I found myself able to listen not just to an entire disc of these wonderful songs, but to two, which will be sharing my player for a while.
While we're in the neighborhood, Bryan Hymel's new Heroique: French Opera Arias (Warner Classics) is so splendid the only thing to say is: get it. Jonas Kaufmann can't sing all this stuff everywhere, and Hymel's his own man vocally and artistically. He's magnificent in the expected repertoire, by Berlioz, Gounod and Meyerbeer (and Rossini and Verdi in their operas for Paris), but he's really firing on all cylinders by the soaring tenor aria from Massenet's Herodiade �" and the little-known arias by Reyer, Bruneau and Rabaud that end the disc are revelatory.