Les pecheurs de perles (review)

Looking at old photographs of vintage operatic productions and Golden Age singers both in costume and in (usually regal) mufti is, for me, five parts nostalgia to one part amusement. As a consequence, my battered copy of Daniel Blum's A Pictorial Treasure of Opera in America has given me hours of pleasure.¹

It has also colored my mental picture of operas I haven't seen onstage, and the color is generally sepia. Thus, my image of Bizet's Les pêcheurs de perles was formed by the photos on pages 300 and 301 of Frieda Hempel, Enrico Caruso, Giuseppe De Luca, and Léon Rothier, who starred in a new Metropolitan Opera production of the work in 1916. In that only-three-performance revival, Caruso sports a toothbrush moustache redolent of silent-screen comic Ben Turpin, a lightly polka-dotted sleeveless blouse, slippers that curl up at the toes Ali Baba–style, a calf-length patterned skirt with large tassels hanging from a kind of belt-sash combo, and a big turban over what looks like shoulder-length dreadlock-style braids. De Luca has an upturned lampshade on his head, wedgelike sandals on his feet, and several big necklaces around his neck; his shirt-vest has puffy elbow-length sleeves, and his sarong is overlaid with what looks like a skirt made of knotted cords. Hempel is shrouded in a gauzy white sarilike affair complete with cape and cowl, Rothier's long white hair and beard suggest Charlton Heston's Moses, and the "dancing chorus" looks like a bus-and-truck backup corps for Ruth St. Denis or Little Egypt.

Needless to say, nobody in that cast could pass for a resident of beachfront Ceylon, and Caruso's bare arms don't resemble the toned limbs of an Abercrombie & Fitch model. In this age of gym-buffed singers, stage directors enjoy making Bizet's Nadir and Zurga shirtless. I assume that Alfredo Kraus and Vicente Sardinero were well protected from onstage drafts in the Bilbao Theatre's 1981 production of Bizet's neglected seahorse opera. But, on the evidence of this generally good-sounding in-house recording, it would seem they decided to prove their Iberian machismo in the heart of Basque country by singing fortissimo as often as possible. Even the routinely tasteful and refined Mariella Devia, whose command of high pianissimos is second to none, indulges in her colleagues' fondness for high decibels.

As you would expect, Kraus sings with plenty of suave legato. But while he does taper the high Bs in Nadir's dreamy "Je crois entendre encore" a bit, he doesn't sing them in head voice or float the aria with ideal Gallic lightness, and he caps his big solo with a stentorian high C. The role suits the veteran tenor admirably, however, and it is nice to have a souvenir of one of his favorite assignments.

Sardinero eschews Zurga's optional high notes, but he stints on nothing else, especially volume, in his rich-voiced but unsubtle reading. He ends his third-act aria "O Nadir, tendre ami de mon jeune âge" with an unwritten high note for crowd-pleasing effect, but ironically his strong performance garners no applause whatever from the audience that had whooped its approval of Kraus's long-held high B-flat at the end of Nadir and Zurga's act 1 duet "Au fond du temple saint."

Devia's rendition of Leïla's "Comme autrefois" is not the last word in rapt reverie. But her high C near the end is wonderfully free and ringing, as is the optional high D she takes and effortlessly prolongs at the close of the evocatively florid choral prayer to Brahma that concludes the first act, and I find the Italian soprano's...