Of the performance, I would say that it is strong enough to allow us to discover what’s in the 1859 Faust, without often carrying us away with the potential drama and emotion of it. Rousset has at his disposal a good band in Les Talens Lyriques, and a chorus (the Flemish Radio Choir) that is aesthetically pleasing and irreproachable from a musicianly perspective, without ever sounding much like a gathering of stage animals. I liked the Prelude—grave, with long holds on the empty beats and sharp accents on the fps. As we go along, the clean attacks and the clarity of instrumental interplay (usually when smaller groups are involved), the close observance of dynamics and elucidation of instrumental balances, offer many moments of appreciated observance, and God knows we have heard this score sink into plodding weightiness and gummy textures. In terms of pacing, though, it’s all rather pushed-through, as if a “brisk reading” could take the place of rubato, of a delineation of effects and moments. In the Kermesse, for example, the Song of the Rat and the waltz are both terribly rushed; in Act 3, Sc. 4 the Serenade is a metronomic run-through; and in Act 4 the final trio has no sense of dramatic build. In general, the singers have little room to breathe or to mold shapes, to inflect nuances of their own. (Granted, we face again the question posed by Chailly’s Madama Butterfly: if they were granted such space, would they know what to do with it? I don’t know the answer to that.)

The casting is only minimally successful, no doubt due in some part to the difficulty described above of locating good singers who can also render the extended spoken passages with some conviction. I’m especially puzzled by the choices on the female side. I would have thought that in seeking more of the feel of opéra comique, and with period instruments employed, voices of good strength but lean, pure timbre and notable verbal clarity might have been recruited. Alexandre Dratwicki addresses the choices in an essay in the Bru Zane hardbound book that accompanies the CDs. Commenting that Mme. Miolhan-Carvalho fought shy of Gounod’s more dramatic demands in both Roméo and Mireille (and, I might add, in their stead wangled coloratura showpieces in both operas that have muddled the picture ever since), he notes that the composer requested a full grand opera dramatic voice for Marguerite once his opera “opened wide.” That’s a description that would fit some of the earliest Marguerites we have on record (Emmy Destinn, Félia Litvinne, Emma Calvé, et al.). It does not fit Véronique Gens, who belongs more to my invented Fach of Modern Mezzo, and one lacking in firmness, at that (compare Teresa Berganza or Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, for instance). Her voice has neither the shine and range reach of the true lyric soprano (she avoids the C in the opened Garden Scene cut, and the crowning B of the Church Scene) nor the power of the more dramatic variety, and though Dratwicki speaks of “visiting the lower register at greater length,” that isn’t really true—Gens does not engage with the chest at all. A well-established professional, she applies her instrument to the task assiduously, but it doesn’t sound like any version of the right voice for the part.