L’Île du rêve condenses into an hour of music all the charms of French Romantic opera.
With
Hélène Guilmette
Cyrille Dubois
Anaïk Morel
Artavazd Sargsyan
Ludivine Gombert
Thomas Dolié
Münchner Rundfunkorchester
Choir of Le Concert Spirituel
Hervé Niquet conductot
The youthful Reynaldo Hahn – just seventeen at the time – reveals colouristic talents inherited from Bizet, a prosodic originality anticipating Debussy, and above all the passionate outpourings he learnt from his teacher Jules Massenet. On reading through the score of L’Île du rêve, Massenet told Hahn: ‘To have written that, you must be a poet.’ The plot recounts a French naval officer’s love affair with a young Polynesian girl he is forced to abandon. This subject – also treated musically by Puccini (Madama Butterfly) and Delibes (Lakmé) – is approached in an almost Symbolist style: the Romanticism of the music contrasts with a contemplative, introspective treatment of the narration.
