For those of you familiar with Handel’s opera of the same name, I know most of you are right now thinking, “Ugh. Boresies.” But hear me out—and I say this as someone who was originally dubious of Lully, though my remaining traces of doubt toward the composer have now been more or less eradicated with Acis et Galatée. (And yes, this Ovid count goes to 11.)
First off, if anyone is going to make what would be, to me, a convincing argument for the listenability of Lully, it’s Mark Minkowski. Now, my fan-girl–dom of MM is no big secret; in trying to get flights sorted for what would have been a December 26, 2010 departure from JFK to get to my wedding in Prague, I spent two hours on hold with Orbitz listening to Pachelbel’s Canon—a Guantanamo Bay–level of torture. I never. Ever. Want to hear that piece again. But if Minkowski and his crackerjack ensemble were to play it, I’d listen to it for four hours. Easily.
But back to Lully… Listening to Les Musiciens du Louvre explore this composer reveals more texture than I’ve heard in other recordings (not that they aren’t also commendable, mind). Lully’s orchestrations were vital to the development of opera in France. Poems were written about them. There were more instruments than any French audience had seen assembled at once. Costumes were made for the musicians to wear.
Costume for flutist in Lully's orchestra…An angina trigger for modern unions
Spectacles of onstage mechanics aside, it was worth seeing a Lully opera just to see the orchestra. When was the last time any opera audience member has gone to see something at the Met, La Scala, Covent Garden, etc., solely to check out the orchestra? (Forget even the conductor in this equation for an appropriate mind-f*@k.) And what Minkowski & Co. do here is recreate that anticipatory excitement in hearing a theorbo with trumpet with flute. Music historian Jérôme de La Gorce, in the book Jean-Baptiste Lully and the Music of the French Baroque points out that, while Lully led one of the finest orchestras in Europe, his score notations provide sparse information as to the “size [and] diversity” of orchestral timbres. Some productions used over 100 musicians, others skimped with a mere (” “) 29. The crux of musicological research to develop a historically-informed performance, such as the one Minkowski and LMdL deliver here, involves a great deal of digging and, as de La Gorce places the focus of his essay, referring to the livrets or programs passed out at performances.
So as opposed to, say, a Mahler score that the composer himself notated (such being the treasures newly on display virtually thanks to the New York Philharmonic’s archives), there is more detective work in a piece like Acis than the toughest episodes of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?. And it shows in Minkowski’s work—without sounding didactic, heavy-handed or beleaguered. In fact, with this score—Lully’s final completed work written just before his death of gangrene (because that’s how he rolled)—several late-late-in-life changes are apparent in Lully. First off, he wrote it for the dauphin of France, Louis XIV’s son, a sort of mea culpa to the composer’s former bestie after Lully was all “I like boys!” and Louis XIV replied “I’m all devout now, muthaf*cka!” (Because THAT’S HOW THEY ROLLED.) As such, the opera was performed at a chateau of a member of the nobility during a hunting party, which meant it was stripped-down to the max in comparison to the lavish Versailles extravaganzas that would make Robert LePage cry cry cry. Unlike his famous tragédies lyriques, Acis was also considered to be a pastorale héroique. It shares a lot of the dramaturgical maturity found in Armide (written in the same year) but it’s lighter and shorter and basically written to amuse a hunting party in the woods rather than a gaggle of gentiles at one of the world’s most lavish palaces. It’s more fun that way, the same way that seeing an opera at the Met isn’t as fun as seeing an opera at BAM. In the former, you feel constrained and beholden to a bunch of unspoken codes of conduct that are older than Lully’s gangrenous foot. In the latter, while there are still protocols for behavior in place, you don’t feel like rushing the person sitting behind you to the ER to have the pole in their ass immediately extracted. Armide is generally regarded as Lully’s masterpiece, but I think this may be his best and most forward-thinking work. He was also working with a new librettist as opposed to his standby in Quinault, and while it’s kind of a silly libretto, it gives the music plenty of chances to shine.
But back to Minkowski. It’s not just the instrumentalists here, but also the vocalists that make this a must for any music collection. As the titular shepherd and sea nymph, Jean-Paul Fouchecourt and Véronique Gens are on fire without being overly-ornamented. I’m not usually a JPF fan and will try to do Rameau’s Platée without having to deal with his amphibian shenanigans, no mean feat. But he abandons his shaky upper-upper register here to do justice to the role of Acis. He pairs well with Gens, whose soprano is tailor-made for this sort of music. As two compatriots, their diction is predictably flawless. The entire cast is a who’s-who of Baroque opera. Laurent Naouri (aka, Mr. Natalie Dessay) steals the show as the cyclops Polyphemus (also in love with Galatée…you can see where this story goes). Howard Crook’s tenor illuminates Apollo and it’s hard not to love Mireille Delunsch as Vénus.
Among many other topics of discourse in arts administration, one is how to make people (“make people”) like opera. The Baroque opera revival, propagated by Minkowski and his peers (Haim, Christie, Rousset, et. al.) proved that the way to give the best pitch for a seemingly-arcane operatic form was to give it the best performance one can. BAM was selling out Les Arts Florissants shows long before the days of Web 2.0. Marketing, communications, PR, they’re all important—but they’re only as good as the products they’re pushing. I could have devoted 1000 carefully-selected (mostly) words to any recording here, but without the goods to back it up I’m just talking out of my ass and it’s just taking up nanobytes of space. Fortunately, whatever Minkowski is selling, I’m buying.
