Recording of the Week, L'Heure espagnole from François-Xavier Roth and Les Siècles

It was a smart move on the part of François-Xavier Roth to present L’Heure espagnole as a satyr play of sorts to his revelatory account of Pelléas et Mélisande last year. On the face of it, Ravel’s Franco-Spanish bedroom farce about a highly-sexed clockmaker’s wife trying to fit in an extra-marital assignation while her husband’s out at work seems worlds away from Debussy’s infinitely more rarefied masterpiece - but as the French conductor suggests in a fascinating booklet-interview, Ravel’s equally text-driven opera sought to ‘bring [Pelléas’s] style of dialogue closer to a more colloquial French’ and achieve ‘a quite different kind of modernity’ in the process.

The all-Francophone cast is uniformly terrific, not least because everyone’s so mindful of Ravel’s stipulation that (with one exception) all of the performers should ‘speak more than sing’ their roles, in a manner more akin to the recitatives of Italian buffo rather than French grand opera. Presiding over everything with unflappable chic is the classy mezzo Isabelle Druet, who trained as a ‘straight’ actress before pursuing an operatic career and whose experience in recitative-heavy Baroque repertoire has further honed her ability to deliver text in the conversational style which Ravel envisaged.

Whereas some singers approach Concepción as a sort of suburban Carmen, complete with lashings of smouldering chest-voice and flashes of white-hot rage, Druet gives us a cool-headed, competent seductress who barely breaks a sweat as she stage-manages the chaotic high jinks unfolding around her. The voice is clean, bright and tangy, and her characterisation full of astute little nuances: the lightest touches of portamento in her first conversation with hunky delivery-man Ramiro suggest that she’s already clocked his ‘unsurpassable biceps’ despite her mind being on other things, and her deadpan clarification that she wants him back in the bedroom for pleasure rather than business is all the more delicious for being underplayed.

The men in her life are characterised with the same style and subtlety, with Julien Behr (who sang an outstanding Pelléas for Roth) striking an ideal balance between the sublime and the ridiculous as the narcissistic poet Gonzalve, constantly spewing forth elaborate ‘Baroque verses’ whilst his pragmatic mistress is anxious to get down to business. It’s as if Debussy’s hero has accidentally wandered into an Offenbach operetta, and both he and Roth endow his music with such lyric beauty that it’s impossible to share Concepción’s impatience with his musings.

Thomas Dolié is irresistibly endearing as the respectful, tongue-tied Ramiro: this descendent of toreadors is no one-dimensional beefcake, but a quietly poetic soul who gives Gonzalve a run for his money in the eloquence stakes as he likens the ‘delicate mechanisms’ of Torquemada’s clocks to the mysteries of the female psyche (and possibly body…it’s open to interpretation). With a voice almost as beguiling as Behr’s, Loīc Félix makes Concepción’s husband Torquemada a more sympathetic character than usual, and Jean Teitgen is delightfully bumptious as the lecherous, self-important financier Don Iñigo.

That the singers never feel the need to overplay the sensuality or the broad comedy of the score is due in no small part to the fact that Roth and Les Siècles (performing on instruments from around the turn of the century) supply so much colour and character from the pit. The sarrusophone groans depicting the corpulent Don Iñigo’s attempts to squeeze himself inside a grandfather clock are a delight, the bright-toned period trombones add some piquant dashes of sleaze to proceedings, and the soft-grained strings in the introduction ensure that the three metronomes impersonating Torquemada’s shop-stock make their presence keenly felt.

And Roth’s own precision throughout would rival the clockmaker’s finest wares: Ravel’s every tempo-marking (and there are many) is observed to the letter, but nothing sounds less than entirely spontaneous.

It was a little masterstroke to position Boléro as a sort of postlude to the opera. Adhering to the composer’s own metronome-marking (notoriously contested by Toscanini and others), Roth plays it absolutely straight, with minimal rubato and only the slightest licence to individual players in terms of the portamenti and hairpin bulges we hear so often here. Even if you feel you’ve heard this piece often enough to last you a lifetime, I promise Roth will make you listen with fresh ears.