Recommended: not so much for the performance or even the work as for the experience. And even that is not necessarily something you will want to repeat very often. The point is that it may be now or never. Robert le diable, received triumphantly in Paris at its premiere in 1831, took centre- stage in the opera houses of Europe for two or three decades: a pantechnicon of an opera I was about to call it, and then thought to see what the dictionary had to say, finding there ‘the name of a bazaar of all kinds of artistic work’ – and the date 1830! Apart from a few excerpts (the Invocation, Alice’s ‘Robert, toi que j’aime’, some ballet music) it was more or less removed from sound and sight throughout the 20th century, and no other complete recording is listed. It’s a bold opera company that takes it up now, for it is a prodigious consumer of resources, musical, scenic and balletic, devised for an audience with stamina and the determination to make a good five-act night of it.
Sheer length is one of its problems, and yet a kind of glory too (it’s like being taken on a tour of some vast 19th-century building, massive in construction, rich in picturesque detail). In 1862 The Times was pleased to observe that the ‘performance finishes now just before midnight instead of one o’clock’, and the present live version (with frequent and mostly judicious cuts) lasts three-and-a-half hours. This is hard on the singers, for whereas Les Huguenots shares its burdens and opportunities among seven principals, Robert has only four (or five counting Raimbaut, the second tenor).
Of the two sopranos, Isabelle has the more brilliant part, Alice the best aria. Neither of the present exponents is ideally steady but both are conscientious and Patrizia Ciofi’s pure tone and expressive style earn gratitude. Bertram (the real devil of the piece) is a tremendous role for a charismatic bass: there is plenty of real singing to do, but he must have that extra quality of ‘presence’, both in timbre and appearance. Giorgio Surian has a strong, dark voice which is all too often uneven in production.
The Robert, Warren Mok, is interesting, possibly phenomenal. It’s a voice I wouldn’t feel sure about without having heard it ‘in the flesh’, but he has the range, the fluency, the staying power and (it would seem) the weight of a genuine heroic tenor for Meyerbeer. It is also a voice of many colours, sometimes soft and veiled, then incisively forward, taking the high notes mostly with a straight tenor edge but sometimes with a well-placed head-voice. Such a combination is not too common these days.
The Valle d’Itria production seems to have involved a good deal of stage movement, rumbling somewhat alarmingly throughout the first scenes, quietening down later. Balance favours stage rather than orchestra; applause from the audience seems distant and, at first, uncertain. Renato Palumbo conducts with care for cohesion as well as detail, and the performance (maybe the opera itself also) gets a kind of second wind at the start of Act 4, which is when ordinary mortals might be thinking of going home.
It is important to stay the course and to give the old warhorse a trial run. If this recording convinces enough people that the opera deserves a better production it will have performed a useful service