This superb concert with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment under Jonathan Cohen marked the bicentenary of the death of Étienne Nicolas Méhul, one of the leading French composers in the decades following the revolution, and a figure to whom history has not always been kind. The first composer to be dubbed “Romantic”, he links the classicism of Gluck, whom he adored, with the extravagances of Berlioz, though his experiments with form, harmony and sonority in a quest to match sound with subject, make him, on occasion, difficult to pin down stylistically.
Cohen and the OAE juxtaposed operatic and orchestral extracts with music by his contemporaries: Gluck, inevitably; Salieri, Gluck’s immediate successor in his Paris period; and Beethoven, whom Méhul resembles temperamentally. Longer extracts from fewer works might have been preferable, but even so, the case for Méhul’s originality was forcefully made.
His dissonances still shock and his instrumentation startles. The dark colouring of his 1806 opera Uthal, achieved by omitting violins from the orchestra, is extraordinary: the hero’s melancholy monologue, exquisitely sung by John Irvin, could almost have come from Berlioz’s Les Troyens, written 50 years later. Irvin shared the vocal extracts with fellow tenor Michael Spyres: Irvin’s elegant wit in an aria from the comedy Une Folie contrasted with Spyres’s greater power and intensity, hauntingly beautiful in scenes from Ariodant, assertive and noble in Florestan’s aria from Beethoven’s Fidelio. Cohen’s commitment to this music was everywhere apparent, and the OAE were outstanding.
