Offenbach Operetta Arias – Jane Rhodes

Somebody at EMI’s reissue department deserves a raise, or at least a decent lunch, for stitching this bouquet together out of catalog odds and ends. The best anthology discs never announce their own cleverness; they just sound inevitable once you’ve heard them.

The name at the center is Jane Rhodes, and if you don’t know it you should. French mezzo-sopranos of her generation tended to specialize — the grand tragic roles, or the soubrettes, rarely both. Rhodes had a voice built for Carmen, for the Nurse in Pelléas, for things with blood in them. That she turns out to be a wickedly funny, idiomatically perfect Offenbach singer is one of those happy accidents record catalogs occasionally hand us. Her instrument is almost too rich for this repertoire. You can hear it straining at the seams in places, wanting more room than a cancan permits, and yet she never once tips over into the vulgarity that a heavy voice courts when it tries to act light. That’s a very particular skill, harder than it looks. Regine Crespin had it. Rhodes has it too, in her own more pungent way.

Listen to “Ah! Quel diner” from La Périchole. The character is drunk — gloriously, operatically drunk — and Rhodes doesn’t just color the voice, she rethinks the whole rhythmic profile of the line, dragging here, stumbling there, always snapping back to Offenbach’s tempo just before it becomes sloppy. It’s a tightrope act. “O mon cher amant” gets the opposite treatment: rue and tenderness under the vaudeville tune, the joke of the situation never quite masking the ache. This is what people mean when they talk about French style: knowing exactly how much irony a phrase can bear before it snaps.

The purely orchestral material is a patchwork, frankly, and you can hear the seams if you’re listening for them. The Overture to La Périchole comes from Michel Plasson’s complete album, all Gallic wit and woodwind sparkle, the strings scampering with real point. Fine playing, idiomatic in the way only French orchestras used to manage before everyone started sounding alike. The remainder comes from Louis Frémaux sessions recorded, of all places, in the Festival Hall at Corby — hardly the Salle Pleyel — and you can occasionally sense the room’s flat acoustic robbing the brass of some bloom. Frémaux keeps things moving, though, with a director’s ear for the theatrical timing Offenbach demands and rarely gets outside Paris.

The chorus, present mostly in La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein, sings competently and forgettably, which is probably the correct verdict on choral Offenbach generally. He wrote for soloists who could act. The chorus is scenery.

What’s missing, and missing badly, is any documentation. No texts, no translations, nothing to tell a newcomer why the Grande-Duchesse is inspecting her troops with such unseemly relish, or what precisely has gotten the Périchole so pleasantly soused. Offenbach’s satire depended on specificity, on 1867 Paris recognizing exactly which Second Empire absurdity was being skewered, and stripped of context these excerpts become simply “charming French tunes.” That undersells them badly. A listener who already knows La Vie parisienne and La Grande-Duchesse cold will fill in the blanks happily. Everyone else is left guessing at jokes that were, in their day, genuinely dangerous.

Still, as an introduction to Offenbach’s genius, and to an unfairly under-documented singer’s way with it, this disc earns its keep. Rhodes belongs in the small company of interpreters — Régine Crespin, Mady Mesplé in a different register, Felicity Lott decades later — who understood that operetta is not opera’s frivolous cousin but its own exacting discipline. Buy it for her. Forgive the missing texts, and the industrial acoustics of Corby, for her sake.