US Edition 
Louise, Buxton Festival, review: 'tantalising and frustrating'
It was a mistake to present this little-known but strangely fascinating opera in a concert format, says Rupert Christiansen
Louise is the work of Gustave Charpentier, who lived until he was 96 but produced nothing else of note. First performed in 1900 in Paris, it enjoyed huge success before the First World War, since when its appeal has gradually faded and dated.
This strangely fascinating opera hasn’t now been staged professionally in the UK for over 30 years and I’ve only ever experienced it on disc (a lovely recording with Ileana Cotrubas and Placido Domingo).
But grateful as one must be to the Buxton Festival for a brave and overdue revival, I wonder if it was wise of the cash-strapped management to present it in a concert format: the piece requires a dramatic atmosphere and social context that singers in evening dress on a bare stage can’t generate.
Like Wagner, Charpentier wrote both text and music, and the influence of Tristan und Isolde is evident in the fluency of the vocal dialogue, the richly thematised orchestration and a rapturously reflective erotic duet that is the score’s highlight.
But Charpentier was no myth-making Romantic, and Louise is more remarkable as an attempt to establish an operatic naturalism that told the simple truth about ordinary people’s lives in late nineteenth-century Paris – here the seamstress Louise scandalises her rigidly conventional working-class parents by setting up home in Montmartre with the penniless Bohemian poet Julien and proclaiming a gospel of free love.
What fleshes out the plot is impressionistic scene-painting, a collage of the va et vient of street life, with its cries of hawkers and brassy town bands. It’s all much grittier than Puccini’s similarly focused La Bohème, and more stylistically sophisticated: a Symbolist figure, the Noctambuliste, hymns the spirit of Paris and its pleasures, and there are moments when one feels a presentiment of the cinema of Vigo and Renoir.
The limited forces of the Northern Chamber Orchestra, sensitively conducted by Stephen Barlow, could only hint at the silken lushness of the score, and much of the long evening seemed to pass in a baffling haze. In the title-role Madeleine Pierard sang with a lovely sheen and brought allure to the one showpiece aria, “Depuis le jour”; as the heedless Julien, Adrian Dwyer gamely struggled with Gallic style and vowels. A troupe of student singers played the myriad characters who make up the passing parade. The net effect was tantalising and frustrating: this is an opera that needs its theatre.
Until Sunday; tickets: 01298 72190; buxtonoperahouse.org.uk