Donizetti - La Fille Du Regiment - DVD9 (Dessay - Florez)

Performer: Felicity Palmer (Soprano), Juan Diego Flórez (Tenor), Donald Maxwell (Baritone),
Natalie Dessay (Soprano), Alessandro Corbelli (Baritone), Dawn French ()
Conductor: Bruno Campanella
Orchestra/Ensemble: Royal Opera House Covent Garden Orchestra


R E V I E W:


Although performers and audiences always relish it, La fille du regiment has never been allowed quite the critical “respectability” enjoyed by Donizetti’s other two famous comic operas, L’elisir d’amore and Don Pasquale. However, Laurent Pelly’s 2006 staging for Covent Garden (subsequently seen in Vienna and New York) was greeted with almost universal rapture. The BBC telecast, directed by Robin Lough, now makes a lively, sometimes too lively, DVD production. The problem is that a lot of the comic business when seen in close-up seems very broad indeed. Moments such as the entrance of the Duchesse de Crackentorp as mimed and mugged by Dawn French, amusing enough to see once, might become tedious on repeated viewing. Similarly the scene in which Natalie Dessay as Marie struggles to read the letter that proves her noble birth is rather drawn out.

Chantal Thomas’s sets, in Act 1 using a surrealist motif of enlarged maps, and then for Act 2 a panelled salon, provide a fine setting for the comic antics of Dessay and Alessandro Corbelli as Sulpice. Dessay has something of the manner of the great Giulietta Masina in Fellini’s La Strada and Nights of Cabiria. She is such a natural clown, and it is wonderful to behold the way she uses little bits of the coloratura to illustrate comic points. In Act 1 she irons the regimental long-johns, and in the lesson scene of Act 2 her attempts at dancing, hampered by her elegant party dress, are both touching and funny.

Juan Diego Flórez has made the role of Tonio so much his own that he too uses voice and physique to great effect, falling flat on his back during the duet “Vous m’aimez” (this is his second appearance in it on DVD – the first is on Decca). As always, he negotiates the repeated high Cs in “Pour mon âme” with apparent nonchalance. Perhaps Donizetti’s masterstroke is the finale of Act 1, growing out of Marie’s “Il faut partir”. Here Dessay is picked up and carried offstage, still singing, by the Hortensius of Donald Maxwell. Felicity Palmer makes the Marquise quite vehement and passionate.

Bruno Campanella conducts the Royal Opera forces with a delicate understanding of all the requirements of Donizetti’s often exquisite instrumental detail. Nothing will ever replace the classic Sutherland-Pavarotti-Bonynge Decca set of this opera, which at times seems to anticipate the world of Offenbach and Strauss without ever letting go of its bel canto origins. This is a fine alternative, though I can anticipate using the fast-forward over some of the excessive clowning.

-- Patrick O'Connor, Gramophone [5/2008]