Search - Christoph Willibald Gluck, Mireille Delunsch, Charles Workman :: Gluck - Armide / Delunsch, Workman, Naouri, Podles, Beuron, Polegato, Kozená, Les Musiciens du Louvre, Minkowski

Gluck's Armide

Robin Friedman | Washington, D.C. United States | 03/16/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"To modern music lovers, Gluck is best-known for his Orpheus and Euridice and, to a lesser extent, for Alceste. But he was also the composer of other operas which deserve to be remembered. Among these operas is Armide, which Gluck composed in 1777 for the Paris Opera. (By that time, he had revised his earlier versions of Orpheus and Alceste for staging in Paris.) In setting Armide, Gluck took the liberetto written by Phillipe Quinault which had been used by the great French composer Lully in his opera, Armide, presented in 1686. Thus, Gluck was deliberately setting himself in competition with the earlier master. After Gluck's opera, other composers have set the Armide story, including Haydn in an opera and Brahms in a cantata, Renaldo.



This CD of Armide features the musicians of the Louvre conducted by Marc Minkowski and a distinguished cast of singers. Mr. Minkowski specializes in early music with an emphasis on scores and composers that have not received the attention they deserve. We are fortunate to have CD's readily accessible to explore Gluck's Armide. The work comes through in this release with intensity and passion.



Armide is a story of the power of love and of the war between love and hate. The heroine, Armide, is a sorceress who has just defeated an army of Christian crusaders. She values her freedom and declines to marry unless to a man who can defeat the crusader's hero, Renauld. In the course of the story, Armide casts a spell on Renauld to make him, for a time, love her. But, unfortunately for Armide, she falls in love with Renauld totally and unconditionally. Renauld is ultimately rescued and abandons Armide who bewails her loss mightily and destroys the magic palace she had built for herself and Renaud.



Gluck was known for attempting to integrate text and music into an artistic whole rather than for indulging in lengthy musical flourishes for their own sake. In Armide, he carries out his artistic programme in part. But there are long sections of dances, musical interludes, and scenes that have little dramatic intensity and which run counter to Gluck's austure style of composition. This is probably due in part to Gluck's decision to use, without editing, the early liberetto by Quinault which had been adopted to the different compositional style of Lully. (In the years between Lully and Gluck, some composers had tried to eliminate various portions of Quinault's text to speed-up the action. But Gluck took the original liberetto.)



Gluck's Armide is not often performed today, but it is a treasure. The heroine, Armide, is a great multi-faceted role with arias expressing the extremes of passionate love and deep hatred. The role is beautifully performed on this CD by Mirelle Dellunsch. There is a character in the opera titled "hate", -- hate personified with lengthy arias worthy of the Queen of the Night -- performed guttily and intensely by Ewa Poodles. Charles Workman is an effective Renauld, but this music belongs to the women leads.



The first and fifth acts of Gluck's Armide move with swift intensity while some of the more relaxed material is in act two and, particularly, in act four. For me, the most powerful musical moment of this score comes at the end of the opera in Armide's aria "La Perfide Renaud" which shows her fury at her abandonment by Renaud. Also in Act 5 is a beautiful duet between Armide and Renauld and an "Air Sicilien" featuring the solo flute. The scenes with Hate are stunning.



Gluck's Armide is a grand opera by a great composer. It will delight listeners willing to be adventurous as well as lovers of opera, early classical music, and passionate music. It is a joy to have this work available."

A TALE OF TWO HALVES

DAVID BRYSON | Glossop Derbyshire England | 10/09/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"It's possible to get a strong sense that this opera improves as it goes along. That's been my own experience with it, but it's not so easy to account for why. The best I can come up with is that it's not the performance that gives me this feeling but partly the music itself and above all the libretto.



The story seems to me to break cleanly into two distinct parts, the second part starting at act IV. From this point on we have abandoned Damascus and Christian armies and been spirited away to an enchanted island. Apart from the two principals Armide and Renaud (Rinaldo) acts IV and V have an almost completely new cast from the previous acts, and Armide has changed roles from being a powerful sorceress to being just another heroine spurned in love, a kind of downmarket Dido who finally just magicks herself away leaving the rest of them to their own devices, the Christian armies that the earlier acts were supposed to have been about literally nowhere. This in turn highlights two separate sides of the composer's personality - the dramatist and the composer of tableaux. He excelled in both capacities, but it may have been a bit much to expect him to switch from the former role (in the earlier acts) to the latter within the limits of a single work. Gluck was a musical rationalist and reformer, but also a musical politician and in-fighter, and I suspect that in Armide the two sides to his musical personality come into conflict to a certain extent, with the tableau-composer coming out on top. Keen to establish himself in Paris, he took over the traditional libretto used by Lully, involving a lot in the way of ballet-music and set-pieces in the later acts. Whether he would have done this given a freer hand and fewer entrenched interests to placate, I rather doubt. On the other hand, he was very good at that sort of thing, and I feel simply that his best inspiration belongs in these later acts, the gem of the whole work being a long aria for Renaud. This is not to say that there is not a lot of fine stuff in acts I-III as well, the jewel of those being another aria for Renaud, just that these acts are not, by and large, quite the greatest Gluck.



The challenge for the interpreters, on this view, is how to handle the first three acts. The excellent liner-essay tells us about a performance from Toscanini that failed, seemingly because the performers tried to ham up the music as if it were Verdi. If so, that was asking for disaster - this music is not at that kind of voltage, and Minkowski knows better than to treat it as if it were. Taking it for what it is, I would say they all do a first-class job. The cast are largely francophone, and the two Americans sing their French very convincingly too, which is particularly important in the case of Workman as Renaud as he seems to me to get the best music in the entire opera. The direction throughout shows admirable taste and sense of proportion - the demons for instance are very urbane and well-behaved demons, the kind of demons you could safely invite to dinner, and I am astonished that Gluck doesn't try to make any kind of effect out of the diamond shield. Brahms is not known as a musical dramatist and his Rinaldo is one of his less-performed works, but his treatment of the moment in Goethe's text when the diamond shield is displayed is simply awesome.



We are in safe hands with Minkowski in music of this period. Period instruments are of course used, and the scale of the performance is judged exactly. If the earlier acts seem less dramatic than they might have been, my feeling is that that is down to the music not to the performers, who know what to avoid. Armide is not Gluck's greatest work, but it's very fine one and this is a set I wouldn't have wanted to miss. To what extent it will suit other listeners I have no way of knowing, but I have tried to make coherent sense of how it all comes across to me."