Hérodiade

Artists

Album Info

Release Date: 1995-09-25

Label: EMI Classics

Recording: November 19-27, 1994, Toulouse, Halle aux Grains
Playing Time: 166 min.
Printed in Holland

Imagine a version of the Salome story in which everybody is nice. Don't laugh: That's what this is. Salome willingly sublimates her passion for St. John the Baptist and closes the opera with her noble suicide. Of the two recent recordings of the opera (the other being under Gergiev), this is the nicer of the two and, for sticklers to French style, the more logical choice. The account of the score is more complete, with lots of ballet music that Francophiles will enjoy and others will find superfluous. Both orchestra and conductor are French. Other than Cheryl Studer (Salome), Ben Heppner (St. John), and Thomas Hampson (Herod)--all of whom sing extremely well--the cast is French and abounds with major voices (such as Jean-Paul Fouchecourt) in minor roles. But the price is an extra disc: This set has three, as opposed to Gergiev's two. Also, one must ask whether a second-tier Massenet opera (which means it's a tad innocuous) is deserving of all the respect that this recording gives. --David Patrick Stearns

Hérodiade is an opera in four acts by Jules Massenet to a French libretto by Paul Milliet and Henri Grémont, based on the novella Hérodias (1877) by Gustave Flaubert. It was first performed at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels on 19 December 1881.
The libretto is a retelling of the story of John the Baptist, Salome, Herod Antipas and Herodias, but is strikingly less psychological and bloody than Richard Strauss's Salome, based on a text by Oscar Wilde. The opera premiered in Brussels because Auguste-Edouard Vaucorbeil, Manager of the Paris Opera house refused to stage the work; "I do like your music," he had said to Massenet, "but as for the libretto, you badly need an author who knows how to build the skeleton of a play." --From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

More Pictures