As with London buses, so with French recordings of Pelléas et Mélisande. When welcoming Pierre Dumoussaud’s fine Alpha set from the Opéra National de Bordeaux in the December issue, I noted that François-Xavier Roth had recently performed it with Les Siècles, a staging by Éric Ruf at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, along with concert performances with the same cast. And now a new recording from Roth and his period-instrument orchestra arrives, not from that Paris production but from Daniel Jeanneteau’s at Opéra de Lille in March 2021, which was streamed soon afterwards. So two French Pelléas on two French labels, both recorded during lockdown.

Close comparative listening brings out many similarities. Both Golauds are sung by baritone Alexandre Duhamel. He sounds rather soft-grained towards the start here but there’s plenty of bite to the voice as his suspicions about his wife and his half-brother take seed, and the scene where he terrifies his son by forcing him to spy on Mélisande is made truly unsettling on Roth’s recording by virtue of using a boy treble as Yniold (the excellent Hadrien Joubert from the Maîtrise de Caen) rather than Dumoussaud’s choice of a soprano.

Both Mélisandes are feistier than the usual waifs. French lyric soprano Vannina Santoni (Roth) has a brighter timbre than Chiara Skerath (Dumoussaud) and seems more determined that Golaud should not touch her. Santoni can be seductive, too, particularly in Mélisande’s great Rapunzel moment, letting her hair tumble from the tower at the start of Act 3, and she blanches her tone significantly on her deathbed.

Roth and Dumoussaud both choose a tenor Pelléas. Stanislas de Barbeyrac’s muscular, ardent Pelléas for Dumoussaud is very impressive, but if anything Julien Behr is even finer for Roth. His Pelléas is more of a dreamer, his slender tenor often floating lines as if in a reverie, and his declaration of love for Mélisande, starting from great tenderness, grows impressively in intensity. Jean Teitgen’s authoritative bass makes for a sympathetic Arkel (as does Jérôme Varnier for Dumoussaud), and Marie-Ange Todorovitch, despite a couple of bumpy moments, is a fine Geneviève.

I enjoyed the orchestral contributions of Les Siècles and the lucidity that period instruments bring to Debussy’s score. Roth doesn’t cut string vibrato entirely, but there’s an almost clinical clarity to their playing. The Harmonia Mundi recording favours the treble instruments more, while Alpha gives more prominence to the bass. The HM engineers also distance the offstage chorus more effectively at the end of Act 1. Roth and Dumoussaud are both excellent, teasing out the instrumental details with care, Roth taking a slightly more leisurely pace. An important difference, however, concerns the interludes. Debussy was forced to hastily lengthen some of these for the opera’s premiere to enable scenery changes to take place. Dumoussaud opts for the original (shorter) interludes, while Roth – like most other conductors – chooses Debussy’s revised versions, likening them in the booklet interview to ‘corridors of time’. That does mean that the new recording stretches to a third CD, although the cost is comparable to the Alpha set.

As I’ve indicated, there’s very little to choose between these two excellent recordings. Pelléas fans will want to hear both.