Wagner, they say, spent a sleepless night trying to get the tunes of Adam's Le postillon de Lonjumeau out of his head. I must say that the pecking couplets, the jingling return of the postillion's Ronde, and the trotting rhythms had a similarly disquieting effect on me as I battled my way through a Vaughan Williams concert the evening after the record-reviewing morning before.
But there is more—a little more—than melody in Adam's unashamed romp. The story, nicely compared in the sleeve-note to a Garbo comedy, deals with the wronged wife regaining her caddish and disloyal husband by pretending to be another: read and mark the infuriating libretto at your peril. Listen rather to the set pieces: a Fragonard village-wedding scene, bagpipes, lusty peasant chorus, simpering bride, crowing groom and all; Chapelou's ''Tourterelle'' love-song (though by now he's philandering in Paris as the idolized opera-singer); and the spun-sugar of the rustic Madeleine, which turns to creme brulee in her assumed guise as the wealthy Madame de Latour.
Adam lets the whole affair bowl along, B dutifully following A with the greatest of ease—and the Monte Carlo Philharmonic under Thomas Fulton respond chirpily enough. There is a deliciously Gallic clarinet solo just before Act 3 for which it's worth skipping a groove or two. Dialogue is kept admirably racy, pungent; reconciliation glows out in thirds and sixths; commotion canters along fugally; and the elementary scheme of expressive tonality as expounded by the dastardly Saint-Phar (alias Chapelou) in the opera-send-up intermede is followed consistently by Adam himself.
What saves the work from mediocrity is its edge of musical and verbal self-awareness. This is something which the two American singers, John Aler and June Anderson, could use a little more of. Aler is up to the demands of the part, top D and all, though his tight one-dimensional tenor is not, perhaps quite the ''voix timbree, flexible et admirable'' which the Marquis opera-director might have wished for.
Anderson is disappointingly lustreless in the important top of her range, and neither singer really points the musical wit quite sharply enough. This is left to the French: Francois Le Roux is a thin lipped, menacing entrepreneur of a Marquis, nicely complemented by the plump bass-baritone of Philippe Lafont's blundering Biju. Those who collect this genre of opera-comique will be happy to add this fresh, well-balanced recording to their collection.'