Premiered at the Opéra-Comique 1872, in a double bill with Bizet’s Djamileh, La princesse jaune was the first of Saint-Saëns’s operas to reach the stage, albeit his third in order of composition, after Le timbre d’argent, its premiere shelved during the Franco-Prussian War, and Samson et Dalila, which no theatre at the time was willing to touch. It drew a blank with its first audiences and critics, who castigated the score for its supposed lack of melody and for being ‘tinged with Wagnerism’ (it isn’t), and it had to wait until the late 1890s to enter the repertory, of which it remains on the fringes: Saint-Saëns revised it for a revival in Brussels in 1896, the version performed here.

A curious piece in some respects, it reflects the fashion for japonaiserie in the wake of the sensation caused by the Exposition Universelle of 1867. The opera is set in Holland (the first European country to trade with Japan) and deals with the artist-scholar Kornélis, who develops an obsession with a painting of a Japanese woman named Ming, the ‘Yellow Princess’ of the somewhat unfortunate title, to the alarm of his cousin, Léna, who secretly loves him. Kornélis, however, is also prone to using a drug called ‘kokha’ and the work’s climax comes when its effects produce a sustained hallucination, in which he imagines himself to be genuinely in Japan, confuses Ming with Léna, and eventually realises it is the latter he really loves. Saint-Saëns’s use of pentatonic melodies, open harmonies and tuned percussion was original and groundbreaking, which may explain the initial bafflement that greeted it: it is perhaps significant that its acceptance came only after others had ventured into similar territory.

Bru Zane has done it proud with this attractive recording made in Toulouse last February. Leo Hussain conducts with considerable dramatic flair and great attention to detail, teasing out all the subtleties of Saint-Saëns’s orchestration. There’s some beautiful playing with lovely horn and woodwind solos and a gorgeous sheen in the Toulouse strings. Judith van Wanroij is the strong, spirited Léna, drawn to Mathias Vidal’s Kornélis but at the same time accepting no nonsense from him. He deploys a ravishing mezza voce in moments of dreaminess but also has the vocal weight for his passionate utterances as the emotional truth dawns. Covid-safe recording conditions necessitated replacing the offstage female chorus with solo singers, van Wanroij and Anaïs Constans. The dialogue has been shortened: sadly, we now have very little about ‘kokha’ and nothing at all about the unseen Professor Paulus, who supplies Kornélis with it.

Its companion piece is a new version of Mélodies persanes, also composed in 1872, originally for voice and piano. Saint-Saëns recast the cycle in 1891 as Nuit persane, a cantata for narrator, soloists, chorus and orchestra. What we have here is effectively the latter with the narrator and choral movements omitted, the songs restored to the 1872 order and some, but not all, of the interludes retained. The aim is to produce an orchestral song-cycle that can ‘compete with Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été’ in the concert hall. Whether it will remains to be seen, but it’s unquestionably beautiful, its orientalism more part and parcel of its fabric than that of La princesse jaune. Hussain does ravishing things with it, as do his singers, one per song: best of all are Jérôme Boutillier, mesmerising in ‘La splendeur vide’, and Constans again, exquisite in ‘Au cimetière’.