Andrew, I've heard of this famous recording, but alas, have not actually heard the recording itself. I know it's highly regarded, and some have even cited it as the premier recording of this Debussy masterpiece.
I know the opera best through a videotaping of the 1999 staging at Glyndebourne, conducted by Andrew Davies, and featuring Christiane Oelze, Gwynne Howell, Jean Rigby, and Jake Arditti in the cast. Oelze (as Melisande) and Howell (as Arkel) were particularly outstanding, with Howell demonstrating his adroitness and depth as a singing actor. I'd recommend this production heartily, if one can allow for some liberties taken in the staging (the action is updated to the turn-of-the-century ambience of the opera's composition, but this is done quite intelligently and elegantly).
Cheers,
Scott
Scott,
I see Netflix carries the DVD of another performance of the same production of Pelleas you mentioned with many of the same artists. You might be interested in it
too if you have not seen it. The one they have from Glyndebourne has Andrew Davis conducting, and Howell and Oelze, but with Richard Croft as Pelleas and John Tomlinson as Golaud. Netflix is bad about getting performances of operas mixed up - their writeup for this DVD mentions artists from another performance they also carry, but you can see from the cover picture that they really carry this one.
I actually heard Davis conduct another opera at Glyndebourne, Die Schweigsame Frau of Richard Strauss. He is a regular there. My sister and brother-in-law knew his wife since she was a soprano from their town in South Carolina, and her mother and my brother-in-law were both on the music faculty of the same college there.
I can rent this DVD since I'm a Netflix member but sadly YOU can not rent a CD of the Desormiere performance of Pelleas, or any other music, from any rental company, because the music companies were successful in getting CD rental defined as a federal crime!
http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#109 So...I hope you have a chance to hear it sometime - legitimately, and with a sacrifice of hard-earned dollars...enough dollars to purchase it, in fact, not just enough to rent it...if you were allowed to rent.
It was just reissued on EMI Great Recordings of the Century, although this remastering of the 1941 recording has been criticized, at about $35. Or if it happens to be your birthday or any equally auspicious day you can get a deluxe 4-CD edition which was issued in 2002 for the centenniel of the premiere in 1902. It is from Andante and comes with a 300-page commemorative booklet (!) and extracts from a number of other early performances, for about $60. In spite of the 1941 recorded sound, this performance does deserve such a lavish presentation.
It is an opera with many other great performances but to me Jansen and Joaquim just ->are<- Pelleas and Melisande - the way Jake and Heath ->are<- those two shepherds. The scene when Melisande lets down her hair from the tower is really indescribable. With his soft but suffused voice, Pelleas sings as if he is about to pass out from the sudden rush of ecstasy. He is about to suffocate because the arhythmia of his heart has made him forget how to breathe.
It is odd to think of this opera's story and then think of Our Film. Pelleas and Melisande are both lonely children who are overcome by their feelings for each other when they are thrown together, before they have a chance to raise their guard. Melisande is married to Golaud as if without personal volition, only because she has no other family, the way Ennis is married to Alma. And Golaud knows no more of who she is than Alma knows of Ennis. Pelleas like Jack is shown to have a loving mother (only briefly seen) and perhaps partly as a result feels secure enough to follow his impulses at great personal risk (I am thinking of the tower scene and Pelleas' last scene). He is warned, but chooses to ignore the warning. Melisande like Ennis lives by a hidden fear, branded by unspeakable experiences and a kind of exile she does not like to talk of. She clings to Golaud and to social expectation without regard to what she might want herself, as Ennis does to Alma. The desperate passionate kiss in both stories is extended as if in defiance of being seen, which it is by the spouse in both. What is really remarkable is the offstage procession of the sheep, seen by a child, in Maeterlinck's play. It is hinted that they will be taken to the slaughterhouse, and this becomes a foreshadowing of the death of the hero...
...all of which only means that the Collective Unconscious, in its ceaseless infinite thrashings, can happen on some of the very same patterns that it hit on a century earlier halfway around the world, and that our brains are sometimes dimly made aware of such similarities across all the other obvious differences...
