The fortunes of Gounod’s Faust have had their ups and downs: down, almost to the point of extinction, in the first half of this century, up in the second, though not so as to regain in the 1990s the status of supreme bourgeois high art which it enjoyed 100 years earlier. To a newcomer nowadays it may well be mightily impressive. Indeed after listening to this new recording, straight through from beginning to end, one can feel something very like awe. The structure is massive, the workmanship infinitely thorough, the boldness of stroke (dramatic and musical) almost breath-taking. And of course the winning numbers come up as in some dream-world lottery.
No doubt the performance contributes to the awe. That is because it is in many ways a very good one, and partly because it underlines seriousness and grandeur. In so doing it goes against the trend of critical opinion (as in the current enthusiasm for Beecham’s 1947/8 version), which values what it sees as the French virtues of grace, gaiety and charm. Those, to be sure, are not excluded – the waltz, the Kermesse, Siebel’s Flower song and much of Marguerite’s role have them in plenty. But it appears that David Parry has joined the swelling ranks of the slowcoaches. The Church scene and Faust’s solo in the garden, for instance, are probably the slowest on record, and in the Ballet music the second dance (marked adagio but not lento) goes half as slow again as the metronome marking.
Happily, there is nothing boring about it. This recording and its production keep the stage in view, and it is particularly good to have the chorus in such clear focus. The principals, too, form a strongly gifted team. Paul Charles Clarke, the Faust, is an interesting tenor, thrustful both in tone and manner yet capable of gentleness and delicacy. He never lets us forget that this is his story; when he is singing there are no throwaway lines, everything counts. His performance of the cavatina has a remarkable high C, taken cleanly at a satisfying forte but held and spun out in a long diminuendo and pianissimo. He seems to have problems in the lower register, however, where peculiarities of tone and vowel-sound can be disconcerting (perhaps fortunately, the least ignorable of these occasions occur in the opening scene before Faust regains his youth). By comparison, Alastair Miles’s Mephistopheles seems a mild-mannered type with reserves of authority and a magnificent voice. Vocally he is very impressive indeed, the fine texture of his voice showing up to great advantage, his production admirably firm and even, his style unfailingly musical. The absence of overt devilry may pass as a virtue, but the absence of character is surely taking the disguise too far. Gounod’s Mephisto is a joker, a man of the world and an exhibitionist; this one, rarely in the spotlight, loses it entirely when Marthe enters the garden in the person of Sarah Walker. The Valentin, Gary Magee, has a fine, vibrant baritone and rises well both to his high notes and his big moments. Diana Montague is an excellent Siebel (and how effectively she rises to hers). The Marguerite, Mary Plazas, is totally likeable, ingenuous but not winsomely so, touchingly sincere in her love and her loss, clean in the scale-work of her Jewel song, a little underpowered in the grand melody of the Church scene, but having a powerful high C in reserve.
The English version by Christopher Cowell reads well, sounds natural and does not affect the artless colloquialism that can be an embarrassing feature of modern translations. Of course, to anyone of my generation brought up on Chorley, with what we knew as ‘Woops the joy’ and ‘Even bravest tarts’ as main attractions, much is missing. Chorley, for instance, has the memorable couplet: ‘Pray, sir, conclude the canticle so well begun/And I will sing, when you have ended, a better one’. ‘But first forgive my interruption of your song! And when it’s over I shall sing some of my own’ is the new version: better English no doubt, but not half as much fun.'