Suppé: Die Reise um die Erde in 80 Tagen – Salvi

Franz von Suppé never went anywhere in particular — Zara, Vienna, the odd Italian holiday — but he made a career out of the sound of elsewhere, and this obscure score proves it again. Naxos has fished up something genuinely rare: incidental music for a stage version of Verne’s novel, premiered at the Carltheater in 1875, apparently never recorded before. That’s a small event on its own. Suppé’s overtures — Dichter und Bauer, Leichte Kavallerie, Ein Morgen, ein Mittag und ein Abend in Wien — have never quite left the pops repertoire, but everything else this composer wrote (some two hundred stage works, by most tallies) has vanished into archives and dust. This disc pulls one piece back into the light.

The music won’t upend anyone’s sense of Suppé. It’s genial, tuneful, harmonically undemanding stuff, closer in spirit to the Offenbach he openly imitated than to the operetta giants — Johann Strauss II, Millöcker — who followed him. But there’s real craft in the orchestration, and a surprising variety of atmosphere across the roughly fifty minutes here. A galop suggests a train hurtling somewhere. A nocturnal number, hushed strings under a solo woodwind, conjures the kind of exoticism mid-century Viennese audiences expected of anything set outside the Ringstrasse, never mind if it bore only a passing resemblance to actual Indian or Chinese music. Nobody in the stalls at the Carltheater was checking Suppé’s ethnomusicology against a scholarly standard. They wanted color, and Suppé supplied it wholesale.

There’s a march that could have wandered in from a different, better-known Suppé score, all snapping brass and triangle glitter. And there’s a waltz sequence, inevitably, because what would a Viennese theater score be without one. None of it aspires to depth. All of it aspires to charm, and mostly succeeds.

Dario Salvi has made something of a specialty of exhuming this repertoire, and his advocacy here is total. He conducts as if this were lost Rossini, every phrase shaped with evident affection rather than dutiful reconstruction. The Janáček Philharmonic Orchestra, recorded in 2021 at the House of Culture in Ostrava, plays with more polish than this modest score probably requires, but that’s no complaint. Winds are characterful without mugging; the brass has heft without blare; string tone is warmer and rounder than one expects from Czech orchestras working outside their native repertoire. The engineering favors clarity over bloom — you hear inner voices, articulation, the occasional squeak of a bow change — which suits music built more on wit than sonority.

One caveat, and it’s not small: this is the version stripped of narration, meaning the connective tissue that once held the piece to Verne’s plot — Phileas Fogg, Passepartout, the whole global itinerary — is simply gone. What remains is a sequence of attractive musical numbers with only the vaguest dramatic throughline. Naxos presumably judged that modern listeners have little patience for spoken narration in a language most won’t understand. Fair enough, probably, from a marketing standpoint. But something is lost. Suppé wrote this to accompany a story, not to stand alone as a concert suite, and shorn of context the piece can feel oddly weightless — charming incident after charming incident, with no destination in view. An unintentionally apt metaphor for a piece about circumnavigation.

Still: there is no other disc to compare this against, no old Vienna radio tape moldering in an archive that scholars can point to as the authoritative version. This is it, the only version anyone can currently buy, and on its own modest terms it’s a pleasure. Nothing here will displace the Overture recordings already on your shelf, but it’s a genuine curiosity, well played, decently annotated, and worth an evening’s indulgence for anyone who loves the operetta era’s blend of tunefulness and travelogue fantasy. Suppé deserves rediscovery beyond his handful of overtures. This disc is a modest but genuine step in that direction.