After a decade of comparative inactivity the Massenet revival on disc is gathering pace again. Following October's live recording of Cleopatre on Koch Schwann, we now have Cherubin, given its premiere at Monte-Carlo in 1903 by a cast that included Mary Garden, Lina Cavalieri and Maurice Renaud. The opera gets a basically good performance in this studio recording, with the advantage of spacious and clear sound: anybody who wishes to investigate one of Massenet's most appealing lighter operatic scores need have no reason to hesitate.
The story concerns the further amorous exploits of Cherubin, better-known to opera audiences as Cherubino, who is now 17 and still more helplessly smitten by an insatiable desire for women than before. There is no other connection with Mozart's opera in the play by Francis de Croisset, from which the libretto was drawn, and it would seem that Massenet's interest was taken more by the period of the story and its openly erotic nature. The rococo spirit is nicely caught, as it was in Manon, by scenes of the well-to-do at play, using pastiche dance music. At one point Cherubin even fights a duel to the accompaniment of a gavotte, a weak passage sometimes cut in performance, though not here. The aim was to create a light and bubbling theatrical entertainment, for which Massenet coined the term comedie chantee. One of the few extracts to have been recorded during the LP era, Nina's delectable Act 1 Air, was included by Dame Joan Sutherland in her Decca set ''Long Live Forever'' (10/70), devoted to musical comedy.
It would be too much to claim that Massenet's Cherubin is anything like as vivid a portrait as Mozart's Cherubino, although it has its own attractions. Frederica von Stade makes the young lad a sensitive soul. She is marvellously touching, for example, in the nocturnal love duet, where Massenet conjures some of the score's most enchanting pages, but has less success at portraying the hot-headed, lustful youth, always quick to draw his sword. When von Stade sang the opera in concert in the early 1980s, she was more outgoing and in firmer voice. The top notes sound strained here.
As in so many of his operas, such as Manon and Thais, Massenet is fascinated with the two sides of the eternal feminine, the innocent and the temptress, but in Cherubin they actually become two separate characters. The pure Nina is very affectingly taken by Dawn Upshaw, though she is neither quite fresh and spontaneous, nor entirely idiomatic. The dazzling L'Ensoleillad is sung with glamorous, but not consistent tone by June Anderson, who might sound really brilliant if she did not lift up to notes from below. (This is the role which includes the Act 3 Aubade, once recorded by Emma Eames on an acoustic Victor.) Samuel Ramey sings with an appropriate air of mature wisdom as the philosopher Jacoppo, Cherubin's moral tutor, evidently a full-time job. The smaller roles are mostly filled by first-rate French singers, including Michel Senechal, whose self-important Duke is predictably engaging.
The score has been recorded without the small cuts used in some of the few modern performances the opera has received. Pinchas Steinberg leads the Munich Radio Orchestra in an ebullient performance, although he allows a couple of slow speeds in the more sentimental numbers (compare Upshaw's inward ''Air de Nina'' with Suther- land's rollicking account). In the last 15 minutes, however, the space he gives the music is fully justified. This is where the adolescent Cherubin faces up to the realities of love for the first time and Massenet, unrivalled man of the theatre that he was, touches upon deeper feelings at just the right moment. In this heartfelt closing scene Cherubin grows into a fully-fledged opera after all.'