Seiji Ozawa studied with both Charles Munch and Pierre Monteux, and French music, from Berlioz to Messiaen and beyond, has always been one of his specialities. Ozawa’s acute ear for orchestral texture and colour and his fastidious attention to detail has always been heard at its best in his discs of the works of Debussy and Ravel, but until now he has never recorded L’Enfant et les Sortilèges.
This version is taken from staged performances of the one-act opera at the Matsumoto festival in 2013, which used the staging by Laurent Pelly that had been seen at Glyndebourne the previous year, and which was also revived there earlier this month. The Japanese production signalled Ozawa’s return to conducting after his recovery from serious illness and – released now to mark his 80th birthday – it’s a performance of remarkable assurance, beautifully recorded with scarcely any extraneous stage noise, and every texture and instrumental detail perfectly placed and meticulously realised by the fabulous hand-picked Saito Kinen Orchestra.
Isabel Leonard is the Child, never coyly childish, and the multifarious doublings among the rest of the cast – including Yvonne Naef as the Mother, the Chinese Cup and the Dragonfly; Anna Christy as the Princess, Fire and the Nightingale; and Jean-Paul Fouchécourt as The Teapot, Arithmetic and The Frog – are all kept just the right side of exaggerated caricature. That’s surely Ozawa’s influence; there’s a light touch to the humour, and a wistful elegance to the moments of pathos, which may not be especially Gallic (compared with, say, the benchmark 1947 Ernest Bour recording on Testament) but which are part of a lucidly thought-out and exquisitely realised dramatic scheme.
Ravel’s song cycle Shéhérazade, recorded at Matsumoto in 2009 with Susan Graham as the mezzo soloist, makes a suitably sumptuous pairing. With Ozawa fastidiously sifting and polishing the kaleidoscope of timbres around her, Graham charts the swelling emotion of the first song, Asie, to an overwhelming climax, then perfectly scales down her approach for the much slighter pair of settings that follows, maintaining the velvety allure of her voice throughout.
