Opera at home
CDs
THAÏS
MASSENET
Chandos CHSA 5258(2)
Massenet’s 1894 opera about the Egyptian courtesan, Thaïs, who is converted to Christianity by the monk Athanaël, has a storied recording history. Three of the earliest feature great French sopranos of the 1950s: Géori Boué, Andrée Esposito and Renée Doria who set high standards for authenticity of style and nuanced delivery of the surprisingly philosophical libretto. Subsequent glamorous singers who have recorded Thaïs include Anna Moffo, Beverly Sills and Renée Fleming. So, the bar is high for this new Chandos release, recorded live in Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall last November with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra under their music director emeritus, Sir Andrew Davis.
Listeners hankering for a modern recording offering wonderful singing, playing and the most up-to-date sound quality need look no further. In an age where studio recordings of old operas are almost unheard of, this product delivers near optimum sound—no intrusive audience noise and great balance between voices and orchestra—and even makes the hall’s notoriously dry, singer unfriendly acoustic sound natural and warm. Davis is a known Massenet-phile and indeed, these performances marked the culmination of a sort of Thaïs world tour with previous outings in Edinburgh and Sydney, as here, with Canadian soprano Erin Wall in the title role. Davis elicits beautifully nuanced playing from the TSO bringing out the myriad of colours in the score. The Toronto Mendelssohn Choir delivers clear diction and appropriate dramatic urgency in repertoire that is quite far outside their usual wheelhouse.
Wall’s clear, silvery soprano is ideally suited to this repertoire. My first encounter with her art was at, appropriately, a special all-Massenet concert mounted by the Canadian Opera Company Orchestra under then-music director Richard Bradshaw at Toronto’s Glenn Gould Studio in the early 2000s. It has been clear ever since (including Wall’s utterly moving Antonia in the COC’s 2012 ) that she has an affinity for French 19th-century opera. Thaïs’s entrance music is unexpectedly unflashy and conversational in tone. Wall shows off endless legato in these phrases, shaping the vocal line with stunning . For the role’s showcase aria in which Thaïs desperately demands of her mirror, “Dismoi que je suis belle” (“Tell me that I am beautiful”), Wall telegraphs the courtesan’s panic that her beauty is fading, and the spiritual crisis she is undergoing. She paints the vocal line with perfect high and stylistically appropriate (yet mostly eschewed today) —the delicate, gentle ‘swooping’ between notes that marks a true French stylist.
