Debussy: Pelléas and Mélisande – review

Hannan/Dean/Howlett/Tomlinson/Walker/English National Opera/Elder(Chandos, three CDs)English National Opera has hosted three productions of Debussy's opera at roughly decade-long intervals. This addition to Chandos' Opera in English archive is taken from the first: the staging by Harry Kupfer, first seen in 1981. The common denominator has been Hugh Macdonald's English translation, an unfussy, lucid rendering of an opera whose vocal lines, so closely wedded to French prosody, present perhaps mor...

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