Purcell - King Arthur Le Concert Spirituel Herve Niquet [DVD] [NTSC]

I should say at once that the French really can do Purcell extremely well. The best version of "King Arthur" that I know is by William Christie (OK, he's American) and Les Arts Florissants (CD only: http://www.amazon.co.uk/King-Arthur-Henry-Purcell/dp/B004CYNMDM/ref=sr_1_3?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1318275062&sr=1-3). Unfortunately, while I don't dispute that the performers in the present case are talented, this is a recording which would be impossible to live with. Actually, it's the kind of performance I walk out of at the interval, if it's live. The problem is the very annoying production, which is punctuated by lots of preternaturally unfunny interruptions by someone dressed like a plumber, usually just when the music gets going. The easily amused French audience loves this sophisticated wit, but I can't imagine why anyone on the outside of a straitjacket would want to watch this recording twice (or even once). The production so hamstrings the performance that there seems little point to reviewing the musical side of things, but I'd say that the singing is good, if the English pronunciation is aspirational, at best; the orchestral playing is well drilled, but a mite heavy for Purcell. It doesn't matter, though. Thanks to the pretentious production, this is a train-wreck. Save your money.

As stated by the previous reviewer... this production is a farce. No doubt not all of King Arthur was meant to be deeply serious, and Purcell had a sense of humour too. However, the lengths to which this production goes to try to be funny, or rather, poke heavy-handed fun at the work itself, makes it very difficult to take the music seriously and experience some of its beauties. This is one (semi)opera DVD I will not watch again, though my kids did enjoy it....

King Arthur is a crazy rewriting of English history after the English revolutions to give some kind of a national identity to that United Kingdom that was nothing but the result of successive invasions and constant European strife. Just that is funny today, but that is Dryden's play and we will be deprived of it. We'll just have the musical intermezzi by Henry Purcell. This composer is the typical and main composer of the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution. The theaters were reopened and censorship was going down quite a lot. They will even invent the copyright a couple of decades later. But the play and the subject were not funny at the time. It was dead serious and no one was supposed to laugh at this new version of English history. The Celtic past of England is laughable when we know they were once and for all dominated and colonized by Julius Caesar and that will not change with the invasions of the Angles, the Jutes and the Saxons, and "marginally" the Danes, and of course not with the invasion of the Normans. The Celtic language will only survive in the Welsh mountains. To evoke the Bretons as the ancestors of the modern Britishers is a fable and a farce. But to that very long play by Dryden, that so serious subject at the time, Henry Purcell gave some dynamism and some fun. The musical interludes and intermezzi are first of all distractions, entertainments. Niquet with the help of two buffoons, I was going to write baboons, Corinne and Gilles Benizio, turns those musical pieces into a real farce by reinventing some kind of funny dramatic line among them, and the line is what happens to a poor stage manager when he is invaded by a band of lurid en lubricious singers. A few extras are added in front of the curtain just for our pleasure. Niquet goes one iota further by turning the musical pieces into some kind of big feast, more of an orgy actually with two perverted monks and a barbecue. This production is a farce and wants to be a farce. That does not serve the music by Purcell badly, wrongly or well. Purcell's music can be served with any sauce you want, it remains Purcell's music but it makes the whole show so much more like what it probably was: a celebration of dramatic freedom and of dramatic entertainment in those troubled years of the end of the 17th century, after they had nearly been re-colonized by the French of Louis XIV. They will remain Germanic, or Anglo-Saxon if you prefer, for ever. Enjoy the farce. Enjoy the music. Enjoy the show and don't forget the show must go on... go on living not being a putrefied and petrified baroque classic, which it is by the way, but let us de-petrify that composer a little. The question is to know whether Niquet went too far. For me he had a black-out moment at the right time though it would have been funny to see King Arthur in his underwear or even in his under-underwear. But well, I guess the opera in Montpellier is not the Moulin Rouge.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID