PELLEAS ET MELISANDE - GLYNDEBOURNE, GUI 1963

As John Steane noted, welcoming Glyndebourne's 1962 Figaro, that "vintage year" saw the return to Sussex of Carl Ebert "to produce not only Figaro but also Glyndebourne's first Pelléas".  Recorded here on its revival a year later, Pelléas was conducted by Vittorio Gui, 78 in 1963, whose connection with the Glyndebourne company extended back to 1948.

If Gui's reading is "Italianate", this is because it gives considerable though never excessive weight to the drama's emotional intensity.  The idea that Debussy's opera is reticent from start to finish is a myth, and in this close-up recording the turbulent anguish of the orchestral interludes is especially vivid.  When the focus is on the voices, the orchestra suffers to a degree in the restricted balance.  That "bright hard edge which is the accursed associate of digital remastering" (JBS on the Figaro discs) is evident here too, though never to a disabling extent: better a hard edge than a pervasive lack of clarity.

In 1963 Glyndebourne fielded a cast of French, Dutch and English singers whose handling of the French text stands up well in comparision with the best recent recordings.  As with Bernard Haitink's account (Naive), hailed by Roger Nichols as setting "a new standard", there is the minor incongruity of a very femine Yniold, and also a Pelléas (Hans Wilbrink) whose occasionally strained moments suggest dramatic engagement rather than musical weakness.  Gui's Denise Duval is an even more persuasive, more convincingly youthful Mélisande than Haitink's Anne Sofie von Otter - although Act 1 scene 2 does rather underline the fact that Anna Reynolds, singing the Mother of Golaud and Pelléas, was actually 10 years younger than Duval.  The Golaud, Michel Roux, had recorded the role in 1955 and again in 1962.  RN concluded that "he did not have the necessary power": but Roux was not the first singer to find the Glyndebourne experience uniquely energising, and there is no lack of force in his telling protrayal of this most maddeningly obtuse of operatic characters.  Guss Hoekman is an eloquent Arkel, and John Shirley-Quirk has all the necessary gravitas as the Doctor in Act 5.

The packaging, with full text (four languages) and production photographs but no biographies of the performers, leaves some unanswered questions; in particular, just how extensive a composite of the works' 10 performances in 1963 is this recording?  Whatever the answer, the result is well sustained and consistent, and as memorable in its way as those versions by Desormière, Boulez and Haitink which RN singled out in his Gramophone Collection study of the work.

GRAMOPHONE, June 2009, p. 90.  Author: Arnold Whittall