The last thing an opera needs is too many words – especially when its subject is as familiar as the story of Don Quixote. The composer-librettist Philippe Fenelon (b. 1952) follows Franz Kafka's version of the Cervantes tale, projecting the Don as a figment of Sancho Panza's imagination, and the opera might have worked better if Fenelon had been able to give a comparable twist to the all-purpose post-Bergian expressionism that dominates his musical language.
Bergian associations are particularly strong at the beginning, where the Don sounds very like the Animal Tamer in Lulu. In general, however, these associations are only superficial, to be heard in the instrumental gestures rather than the vocal line, whose unmemorable declamation often modulates into speech simply to speed up the processing of the text. So, although there are enough words here for a six-hour epic, the whole thing is over in 79 minutes, simply because the music itself does so little of the work.
There are a few effective musico-dramatic moments – a neat take-off of a Monteverdi madrigal, the final sinister climax of confrontation between Quixote and Sancho Panza in which the necessary pathos of the Don's character is powerfully conveyed. But these moments simply highlight the fact that, in the main, the music of this first opera (composed 1984-6) fails to seize the initiative, or to establish a distinctive identity.
The live performance involves some stage clatter, and the singers, though generally at ease with Fenelon's see-saw vocal writing, vary in their ability to project the French text without mangled vowels. The rather dry recording is well-balanced.'