The
Opera Rara
label and company, true to their name, resurrect forgotten operas. There is an abundance of those in the output of
Jacques Offenbach
, who wrote some 100 operettas and operas bouffes, few of which are remembered today.
made a good pick with
La Princesse de Trebizonde
(1869), and this release made classical best-seller charts in the autumn of 2023.
Offenbach
is as full of good,
Arthur Sullivan
-like tunes as ever, and he even discarded a number of them from the operetta's original production in Baden-Baden in the process of preparing a new version for Paris. Those discarded pieces are included here, and there could hardly be a better testimony to
's melodic fecundity. Better still is the action, taking place in a carnival sideshow and suggesting all kinds of ideas for a production set in modern times. It is gloriously preposterous even by operetta standards. A girl, Zanetta, accidentally breaks the nose off a wax figure of the Princess of Trebizonde and agrees to stand in for the figure herself. A prince (a pants role) -- who has dropped a lottery ticket into the till in lieu of paying admission -- falls in love with the "Princess." Meanwhile, the lottery ticket, with a castle as the prize, comes up a winner and overturns the relationships between rich and poor. The comic scenes thus spawned are handled with the needed high spirits by the cast and the several choruses (executed by
's remarkable
house chorus
), and conductor
Paul Daniel
is ideal in this genre, consistently pushing the tempo just slightly in order to bring the forward momentum. This recording is based on a 2022 London production but is a "cast recording," not a live one, and it is quite clear sonically.
has been recorded only twice before, once in Russian (!) and once for French radio in 1966; this sprightly performance is much needed. ~ James Manheim