Offenbach: La Belle Helene.(Video Recording Review)

OFFENBACH: La Belle Helene

Lott, Todorovitch, Thebault, Leger, d'Oustrac; Beuron, Le Roux, Senechal, Naouri, Huchet, Gabriel, Alvaro; Les Musiciens du Louvre (Grenoble), Minkowski. Kultur DVD D2916, 126 mins.

A Belle Helene fit for the gods arrived here this past summer, just in time for the Athens Olympics. The 2000 Paris Theatre du Chatelet production of Offenbach's 1864 opera-bouffe was an enormous hit, surfacing most recently in Santa Fe.

The musical virtues of Marc Minkowski's Helene were already apparent on the CD (Virgin Classics 45477), a spectacularly transparent, elegant and amusing rendition of this gorgeous score, cleaning up dubious orchestral accretions and restoring some delectable cuts. Minkowski delights in the musical satire and Offenbach's silly moments of inappropriateness: the tyroliennes that spin out of nowhere, his off-key approximation of a German band, the deflation of the grand waltz in the Act II finale. The singing and diction are on a similarly meticulous level, a far cry from the general standard of Offenbach performances encountered in Paris lately.

But seeing what zaniness director/costumer Laurent Pelly and his aides have wrought only adds to the musical merriment. Beginning disarmingly in a modern bedroom and bathroom, with a bored wife caught between a TV set and a snoring husband, this Helene plays with ancient and modern Greece, from its archaeological digs to its gaggles of Euro-tourists. Remnants of the neoclassical are ...