Adam: Giselle Excerpts – Martinon

Somewhere in the Decca vaults, a tape box must still bear Kenneth Wilkinson’s handwriting, and you can hear why engineers used to genuflect at the mention of his initials. This Giselle glows. Not with the varnished, over-buffed sheen of some digital remasters, but with a candlelit warmth that makes the strings of the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra sound like they’re breathing the same air as the listener.

I’ve always had a soft spot for Adam’s score, unfashionable as that confession may be in certain circles. It gets dismissed — wrongly — as pretty filler between Giselle‘s mad scene and the willis’ moonlit vengeance, a composer of opéras comiques slumming it in the ballet pit. But Adam knew the theater cold; he’d absorbed Auber’s craft and had an unerring instinct for what a dancer’s body needs from an orchestra — lift, breath, the harmonic equivalent of a plié. Martinon understood this better than almost anyone who’s conducted the score on record.

He gives us roughly two-thirds of the ballet here, working from that curious hybrid textual tradition — Adam’s own 1841 piano reduction filled out eventually by Henri Büsser’s 1924 orchestration, the version that became standard currency in the pit for decades. Scholars can argue all they like about textual purity. What matters on this record is the conducting, and Martinon conducts as though he’d spent his whole career in the Palais Garnier orchestra pit rather than guesting with the Chicago Symphony.

The Entrée de Loys floats by with a melancholy poise that stops just short of sentimentality — Martinon never lingers, never indulges, yet somehow the phrase breathes anyway. That’s a conjuring trick few conductors manage. Too many make Adam sound like warmed-over Offenbach; Martinon finds the undertow of tragedy running beneath the charm, the shadow that eventually swallows Giselle whole.

And when the ghost story arrives — oh, the Scène d’Hilarion, with those fanfares cutting through the hall like cold air through a cracked window — you feel the theatricality Martinon brings even to a studio release with no dancers present, no sets, nothing but musicians and microphones in some Parisian hall in the early ‘60s. Goose bumps, genuinely. Few studio ballet recordings manage that sense of stakes, of something actually happening rather than merely being played.

The playing itself isn’t flawless — Paris Conservatoire string sections of this vintage rarely were, all gut and sinew rather than the burnished uniformity you’d get from the LSO or the Concertgebouw. There’s scrape in the Marche des vignerons, some moments of visible effort in the louder tuttis where ensemble starts to fray at the seams. But I’d take this committed scrappiness over bloodless precision every time. These are musicians playing a score many of them probably performed live dozens of times in the pit at the Palais Garnier, and that familiarity tells.

HDTT’s transfer, sourced from a clean LP pressing rather than compromised tape, captures all this with remarkable fidelity — the analogue warmth intact, though inevitably there are small surface intrusions here and there, the occasional pre-echo ghost of a louder passage to come. Minor stuff. Anyone who’s heard HDTT’s uneven track record — their Szell Mahler Fourth never quite escapes CBS brittleness, their Schmitt transfer genuinely difficult to sit through — will recognize this as one of their genuine triumphs, engineering worthy of the original Wilkinson/Minshull production values.

Does it unseat other recordings? Richard Bonynge’s complete Decca account with the same orchestral forces remains the reference for those wanting every note Adam and Büsser produced, warmly if sometimes blandly conducted. Mark Ermler’s Royal Opera House version has its partisans too. But for sheer dramatic conviction — for a Giselle that genuinely sounds like theater rather than excerpted highlights — Martinon’s selective, idiosyncratic traversal earns its place on the shelf. Recommended, with only the mildest reservations about the inevitable gaps time has left in the transfer’s smoothness.