Review:

  Tiresias's Tits: 

  Ample Abundance

  Kamyar Atabai 

Despite the Cassandras who regularly announce the end of the classical music recording industry, each year brings plenty of new releases both to stretch the wallet and the shelf space of the consumer. Whilst new recordings of the traditional repertoire are less prevalent, the recording of non-standard repertoire continues to expand in ways unimaginable even 20 years ago – who could have predicted multiple versions of Handel's operas, Berio's Sequenzas or Hildegard of Bingen's sacred music? To those interested in music beyond the classical mainstream, it has been a time of great bounty.

My particular fetish is Les Mamelles de Tirésias, Francis Poulenc's opera premiered in 1947. The opera's title is routinely translated as The Breasts of Tiresias, but The Tits of Tiresias is more accurate, if possibly still too racy for audience sensibilities. Setting Apollinaire's surrealist play from 1917, Poulenc creates a small miracle: an opéra-bouffe lasting just under an hour that is simultaneously hilarious and mellifluous, humor and beauty cheek-by-jowl. The plot involves a gender-reversing couple, an amorous gendarme, a pair of drunk duelists, a blackmailing journalist, and 40,049 babies born in a single day – a Monty-Pythonesque "and now for something completely different" series of burlesque scenes culminating in a tuneful admonition to make more love (and more children.) Not to mention the title characters who pop out of the heroine Thérèse's dress during her transformation into Tirésias (her male avatar), and which she summarily bursts: usually performed by balloons.

EMI recorded the opera in 1953, less than a decade after its premiere. It can't have been a promising commercial prospect, but the end result is so good that the next official recording only appeared 45 years later. The soloists, orchestra, and chorus of Paris's Opéra-Comique perform under the baton of André Cluytens, recipient of detailed instructions from Poulenc before the recording sessions. Despite its limited mono sound and a few less-than-stellar vocal contributions (in particular, mezzo-soprano Marguerite Legouhy in a number of roles is a chore to listen to), the Cluytens performance is desert-island material. The performance never sags: the giddy momentum of Cluytens's leadership and the bravura of the cast keep things moving; particularly necessary as Poulenc's compositional style can be a little "cut-and-paste" and any hesitations tend to accentuate the joins. Though not quite an original cast recording, enough of the premiere cast is present, including Émile Rousseau as the Gendarme (especially droll in his deadpan flirtations with the cross-dressed Husband), Serge Rallier as the Journalist, and Robert Jeantet as the Director, to give the listener the frisson of a historic document.                      

Dominating the entire recording is the Thérèse-Tirésias of soprano Denise Duval, who created the role at the Opéra-Comique. She has a typically "French" sound: rather forward, slightly nasal, and hardly conventionally beautiful – no bel-canto nightingale she. No matter – Duval's élan coupled with her vaudevillian timing triumph over any vocal shortcomings. She encompasses all the moods of the music with nonchalant facility; her verve and wit infuse each outlandish line and situation with complete conviction. Whether as the desperate housewife Thérèse, the tyrannical Tirésias or the mysterious Fortuneteller (her penultimate incarnation), Duval's bright, focused tone makes her the pivot of every scene and of the entire opera, even though the excellent Jean Giraudeau as the Husband has more stage time and music. One might think that Poulenc wrote the part with her in mind, when in fact one reason for the delay between Poulenc's completion of the opera in 1944/45 and its initial performance was the difficulty in finding a suitable soprano after Geori Boué dropped out. Once heard as the heroine, Duval is difficult to forget, which may partly explain the 45 year lag until the next recording of Les Mamelles.

At last, in 1998, Philips issued a new recording of Les Mamelles, conducted by Seiji Ozawa and originating from the Saito Kinen festival in Japan. The cast is Anglo-American-French-German (with the one Japanese principal in the same roles as Marguerite Legouhy in the earlier recording, and ironically and unfortunately, sounding like her too.) The clarity of the digital stereo recording coupled with Ozawa's well-delineated textures brings out myriad details absent from Cluytens's more hurly-burly version. This could also be because Ozawa is recording Poulenc's 1963 revision of the score (the recording doesn't specify), wherein Poulenc re-orchestrated the piece to lighten the sound of the orchestra. Ozawa conducts the opera beautifully and a little grandly, missing a touch of cabaret essential to the piece. He does keep the music moving forward, despite some temptations to linger that he doesn't always resist. Even though the opera was recorded concurrent with stage performances at the Saito Kinen festival, the recording is not palpably theatrical, unlike the Cluytens performance. A more temperate outlook replaces the giddy verve of the earlier version.

The slightly staid effect of the newer CD is also the result of another singularity of our times: the internationalization of style in opera performance. In place of the resident zanies of the Opéra-Comique troupe, the Philips recording offers a polyglot, international cast gathered for a festival. Instead of glorying in Apollinaire's puns and wordplay, Ozawa's cast treads softly and gingerly through this linguistic minefield. Of the two French singers, Jean-Phillipe Lafont as the Director struggles with his demanding Prologue, and bizarrely seems less at ease with the difficulties of sung French than some of the rest of the cast. As the Husband, Jean-Paul Fouchécourt becomes the focal point of the entire performance, with his idiomatic phrasing, innate sense of French style and strong characterization. Barbara Bonney sings well as the heroine, she has all the roundness of tone that Denise Duval lacks, but Bonney is merely pretty in the role – there is little character and face in the voice. The rest perform adequately (though with some odd French), with a special mention to Graham Clark for his vivid duelist Lacouf. All things considered, this is probably what Les Mamelles sounds like today in major opera-house performances, as it gains a hold on the edges of the international repertory. The days of all French casts in French opera are long gone, and Les Mamelles could do a lot worse than this slightly muted performance.

In 2003, the enterprising label Brilliant Classics issued another recording of Les Mamelles, performed by the Dutch company Opera Trionfo and the Nieuw Ensemble orchestra conducted by Ed Spanjaard. Composer Bart Visman re-orchestrated the score for 17 players for Opera Trionfo's 2001 touring production, recorded the following year. Visman's version of the score is a delight – his affection for the work results in an adaptation that sounds remarkably close to Poulenc's original. The reduced orchestral landscape does the work little harm, as Visman's solutions for a smaller orchestra never result in a thinner sounding score. In any case, Les Mamelles could be performed with even less of an orchestra than Visman's version (and has been), and still retain its unique color and sound, so specific is Poulenc's setting of text and situation. Spanjaard conducts a lithe, buoyant account of the score, closer to Cluytens's exuberant approach than to Ozawa's smoother, international style.

The Opera Trionfo performers are young Dutch singers (plus one Canadian), who scarcely rival the singers on the previous sets in fame or international exposure. However, this proves to be no shortcoming. Their handling of the French language puts the efforts of Ozawa's global team to shame. Though not as idiomatic as the Opéra-Comique team (hardly to be expected), the Opera Trionfo singers articulate Poulenc's setting of Apollinaire's verse with clarity and joie-de-vivre. Their linguistic comfort makes for an animated and spontaneous-sounding performance. There is a real sense of company in this recording, and it's almost invidious to single out any one singer for praise. No one reaches any great heights, but nor is there any gracelessness, barring the sub-par French of the Canadian singer as the Son. What's more, a small bonus of this recording is the restoration of a verse of the Husband's couplets in Act 2 included in the published score, but for some reason cut in all the other recorded performances of Les Mamelles: it begins "Modern music is shocking/Almost as shocking as modern design."

For the Les Mamelles completist, there is one other commercially issued recording, released by Marccato Edicions in 1999. The performance is by Opera Alternativa under the musical direction of Carles Puig (with one piano and percussion in lieu of an orchestra), and in a Catalan translation by Sergi Moreno-Lasalle as Les Mamelles de Tirèsies. Opera in translation is a tricky proposition, especially so in this instance because of the care Poulenc took in setting Apollinaire's "untranslatable" text. In this case, Catalan sounds similar enough to French that the prosody seems little affected by the translation. (I should note that I don’t speak a word of Catalan, so my impression is a purely aural one). As Les Mamelles de Tirèsies indicates, many Catalan words are also extremely close to their French equivalents. As to the highly reduced "orchestra", there is composer-sanctioned precedent for such a presentation: with Poulenc's approval, Benjamin Britten premiered Les Mamelles in the UK at the 1958 Aldeburgh Festival with only two pianos. The performance works agreeably on its own terms, its intimate scale turning Les Mamelles into a cabaret-opera. Singing in their native tongue, the performers, led by the exuberant heroine of Marta Fiol, are all perfectly in character, and like the Opera Trionfo and Opéra-Comique groups are obviously a company working together. Once the ear adjusts to the sonorities of the reduced accompaniment, Poulenc's witty score weaves its usual spell.

I certainly don't believe in the notion of a "best" recording – definitive is in the ear of the listener. Is the beauty that Ozawa finds in the score less valid than the vivacity of Cluytens's reading? Is the cabaret-scale performance of Opera Alternativa too diminutive, and the chamber adaptation of Opera Trionfo more apt for a stripped-down Les Mamelles? All four recordings are compelling, and since none of them share the same orchestral forces (unless my assumption about Ozawa's recording is incorrect), the variation amongst them makes for fascinating listening. Is any of them perfect? No, but then perfection would be a bore. It would deprive us of the anticipation of another recording of Les Mamelles.