Edgard Doneux, Paul Strauss - Grétry: Zémiere et Azor, Danses Villageoises, Céphale et Procris (1990)
EAC | FLAC | Image (Cue & Log) ~ 629 Mb | Total time: 73:45+70:45 | Scans included
Classical | Label: EMI | # CMS 69701 2 | Recorded: 1974, 1975
EAC | FLAC | Image (Cue & Log) ~ 629 Mb | Total time: 73:45+70:45 | Scans included
Classical | Label: EMI | # CMS 69701 2 | Recorded: 1974, 1975
More or less contemporary with Mozart, Grétry wrote more than fifty quintessentially Classical operas which enjoyed phenomenal success during his lifetime (this one was produced as far afield as New York in 1787). On the basis of this recording, made in 1974 in Brussels (Grétry was born in Liège but was dead by the time the state of Belgium was created, making him an honorary, if not actual, famous Belgian), it seems a shame that his work – or this comic reworking of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ at any rate – has latterly been overlooked. The music, brightly performed by the Belgian Radio and Television Chamber Orchestra, is attractively melodic, if hardly profound, and the drama affords fantastical possibilities for an imaginative producer: a table decked with food appearing from nowhere, a magic moving picture in which the heroine watches her family after she has left them; and the transformation of the monstrous hero into a handsome young man.