Chabrier - Overture to L'étoile

Alexis-Emmanuel Chabrier (18 January 1841 - 13 September 1894)
Overture to L'étoile
Berliner Philharmoniker (orchestra), Simon Rattle (conductor)
Live recording, 2015
Taken from this concert: www.digitalconcerthall.com/en...
Alexis-Emmanuel Chabrier was a Romantic composer and pianist, born in Ambert, central France. His bourgeois family did not approve of a musical career for him, and he studied law in Paris and then worked as a civil servant until the age of thirty-nine while immersing himself in the modernist artistic life of the French capital and composing in his spare time. From 1880 until his final illness he was a full-time composer.
Although known primarily for two of his orchestral works, España and Joyeuse marche, Chabrier left a corpus of operas (including L'étoile), songs, and piano music, but no symphonies, concertos, quartets, sonatas, or religious or liturgical music. His lack of academic training left him free to create his own musical language, unaffected by established rules, and he was regarded by many later composers as an important innovator and a catalyst who paved the way for French modernism. He was admired by, and influenced, composers as diverse as Debussy, Ravel, Richard Strauss, Satie, Stravinsky, and the group of composers known as Les six. Writing at a time when French musicians were generally proponents or opponents of the music of Wagner, Chabrier steered a middle course, sometimes incorporating Wagnerian traits into his music and at other times avoiding them.
Chabrier died in Paris at the age of fifty-three from a neurological disease, probably caused by syphilis.
L'étoile is an opéra bouffe in three acts by Emmanuel Chabrier with a libretto by Eugène Leterrier and Albert Vanloo.
Chabrier met his librettists at the home of a mutual friend, the painter Gaston Hirsh, in 1875. Chabrier played to them early versions of the romance "O petite étoile" and the ensemble "Le pal, est de tous les supplices..." (with words by Verlaine which Leterrier and Vanloo found too bold and toned down). They agreed to collaborate and Chabrier set about composition with enthusiasm. The story echoes some of the characters and situations of Chabrier's Fisch-Ton-Kan.
L'étoile premiered on 28 November 1877 at Offenbach's Théâtre des Bouffes Parisiens. In its initial run the modest orchestra was appalled at the difficulty of Chabrier’s score, which was much more sophisticated than anything Offenbach wrote for the small boulevard theatre.
It was first performed outside France in Berlin on 4 October 1878, then in Budapest on 23 November 1878. In New York City in 1890 at the Broadway Theatre, an English adaptation by J. Cheever Goodwin was titled The Merry Monarch, with new music by Woolson Morse. Chabrier's music fared no better in London in 1899, where the score was rewritten by Ivan Caryll for an adaptation at the Savoy Theatre called The Lucky Star. In Brussels in 1909, Chabrier's music was restored, and there was a performance at the Arts Décoratifs Exposition in Paris in 1925, conducted by Albert Wolff.
The operetta's first major revival was on 10 April 1941 at the Opéra-Comique in Paris under Nazi occupation, with Fanély Revoil, René Hérent, Lillie Grandval and André Balbon, at which time highlights were recorded, conducted by Roger Désormière; this production was revived in December 1946 with Revoil and Payen. New productions were mounted at the Opéra-Comique in October 1984 with Colette Alliot-Lugaz and Michel Sénéchal in leading roles, and in December 2007 with Jean-Luc Viala and Stéphanie d’Oustrac.
The first complete recording, by EMI in 1985, conducted by John Eliot Gardiner, followed a production at the Opéra National de Lyon the previous year starring Alliot-Lugaz, which was also filmed for television by FR3 in November 1985 and broadcast in 1986.
L'étoile has been performed with increasing frequency and further afield over recent years, with productions at Opera North in 1991, Glimmerglass and Maastricht in 2001, New York City Opera in 2003 (revived in March 2010), Toronto in 2005, Montreal and Cincinnati in 2006, Zurich in 2007 and Geneva in 2009. In 2010 it was performed at the Austin Lyric Opera, Texas, the Berlin State Opera (conducted by Simon Rattle) and Theater Bielefeld. A production by David Alden has been mounted in repertory at Frankfurt Opera in 2010 and 2011. New Sussex Opera staged a touring production in Sussex and London in English, as Lucky Star, in 2013 (conducted by Nicholas Jenkins).
The opera was part of the Dutch National Opera's 2014/15 season in October 2014. The Royal Opera (London) gave several performances in early 2016, the first at that house.
Sources:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanue...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27%C3...)
Project files:
drive.google.com/open?id=1RQU...

[@ZachOnett]

Chabrier’s scores always look so pleasant and clear.

[@ZachOnett]

Thanks for this upload! It’s cool to watch a reduction like this!

[@PentameronSV]

Thanks for watching! This score may look different from the existing scan at IMSLP because I edited the images to make them clearer.

[@svits.9138]

@@PentameronSV Oh so I'm not the only one hahah. I just spent a good month cleaning out the notes to Lyapunov's first concerto.
I just found your channel. Do you know of any other smaller channels? I am mostly only aware of the big ones like thenameisgsarci and such

[@PentameronSV]

@@svits.9138 Jaegone Kim, Thomas van Dun, Azurelith, Gamma 1734, PRoh Full score music, George N. Gianopoulos, Cameron Wong, Octavestorm, Im Walde.

[@PentameronSV]

@@svits.9138 Check out Precipotato as well.

[@duicic8541]

Few played more artfully and whimsically with the possibilities of the modern orchestra than Chabrier.

[@MoldySoup]

Wonderful. I cannot believe I did not know about this until now.

[@PentameronSV]

Indeed. Chabrier's works are fun to listen to and they truly deserve more attention.

[@juansanabria6794]

Do you mind uploading Igor Stravinsky's- rite of Spring of the better version by that other composer or what not?

[@PentameronSV]

Huh? What do you mean?

[@juansanabria6794]

@@PentameronSV 8 months ago on another Rite of Springs video, you said that you the older version downloaded before it was taken down and replaced by Bernstein's rendition that many people criticized not be as good as the former.

[@PentameronSV]

@@juansanabria6794 Ah, that one. There is already another score-video of that work (using the Yoel Levi recording) uploaded on CZcams around 4 years ago:
czcams.com/video/hPXelTuybnU/video.html

[@PentameronSV]

@@juansanabria6794 In other words, I don't need to re-upload Cmaj7's score-video, because another score-video of Rite of Spring using the original Yoel Levi recording is already available on CZcams.

[@PentameronSV]

It's back since a year ago! (on CMaj7's channel)
czcams.com/video/FFPjFjUonX8/video.html

[@jkim8738]

Is this originally a piano music?

[@PentameronSV]

Mostly likely originally orchestral, but I used Léon Roques' vocal score on IMSLP, since I couldn't find the orchestral score.

[@jarnomontanamusic23]

Agoante emmanuel