Méhul Overtures and Revolutionary Works – Les Jacobins

Somewhere between Gluck’s austere marble and Berlioz’s blazing brass there is a composer most concertgoers know, if at all, from a single overture yanked out for context on some “Beethoven’s Contemporaries” disc. Méhul deserves better. He got, thank heaven, a disc that treats him as more than a footnote.

The gimmick here — and I use the word without disparagement — is arrangement. Someone, presumably Mathieu Lussier, has taken three of Méhul’s opera overtures and refitted them for wind octet. The Harmoniemusik tradition of transcribing operas for wind band goes back to the 1780s, when every provincial court wanted Figaro or Don Giovanni for its Tafelmusik without hiring a full pit orchestra. Mozart grumbled about pirated arrangements of his own operas; Beethoven’s wind octet arrangements circulated for decades before audiences heard his symphonies in their orchestral skins. What’s different here is that Lussier swaps one oboe for a flute. It sounds like a small change. It isn’t. The added brightness up top gives these scores a silvery, almost pointillist quality the standard oboe-clarinet-horn-bassoon octet can’t match: more air in the sonority, less reediness, a wider palette for imitating what would have been string figuration in the pit.

Does it work throughout? Mostly. The overture to Mélidor et Phrosine has a nervous, scurrying energy that period bassoons articulate with real bite — you can hear the wood of the reed, not just the pitch. Ariodant, tighter and more compact, comes off almost like a curtain-raiser Cherubini might have envied; Méhul and Cherubini were close, after all, two Revolutionary-era opera composers whom Beethoven admired more than he generally admitted admiring anyone.

The chase music is where I braced for disappointment. La Chasse du jeune Henri lives and dies on its horn calls — that famous hunting-horn theme that Berlioz himself must have had somewhere at the back of his ear when he wrote the “Royal Hunt and Storm” music decades later. Take away the orchestra’s depth of horn section and string tremolo, and you risk a thin, effortful imitation. It doesn’t happen. The two hornists dig into the fanfares with real swagger, using — I assume — narrow-bore period horns whose stopped notes have a burred, outdoorsy edge that modern valved instruments iron out. They sound like they’re having fun. It shows.

The revolutionary miscellany fleshes out the disc’s argument: that Méhul, more than almost any composer of his generation apart from Cherubini, understood how to give civic ceremony genuine grandeur without descending into bombast. There’s a lineage worth tracing here — Gluck’s noble simplicity filtered through the fervor of 1789 and out the other side into Berlioz’s Symphonie funèbre et triomphale, written some three decades later for entirely different political purposes but breathing the same rhetorical air. Listening to these shorter Revolutionary pieces is a bit like hearing Berlioz in miniature, before he existed.

Only “Le Chant du départ” falls short, and predictably so — strip away massed voices from a song meant to send citizen-soldiers off to war with tears and slogans both, and you’re left with something oddly polite. It wants chest voice and unison choruses roaring in a public square, not winds however well-schooled. A small blemish on an otherwise persuasive record.

Period instruments, arranged music: the two ideas sit slightly oddly together, philosophically. If you’ve rewritten the piece entirely, does “authenticity” of instrument really answer the same questions it answers in, say, a Gardiner Beethoven cycle? I’m not sure. But the sound itself argues for the choice: pungent, slightly acidic winds, minimal vibrato, a bassoon that growls instead of purring. Not quite the polish of a modern conservatory octet, and better for it.

The engineering sits you close, perhaps a shade too close in fortissimo passages where the reeds can turn slightly raw, but there’s no papering-over of ensemble or intonation, and none is needed. These are accomplished players who know this idiom from the inside.

Nobody is going to mistake this disc for a substitute for the operas themselves, most of which remain unrecorded complete or nearly so — a genuine scandal, given how much Beethoven and Cherubini both owed this composer. But taken for what it is, an inventive repackaging of Méhul’s occasional and theatrical music, this disc earns its keep. Recommended, with enthusiasm outrunning reservation.