Jérôme Pernoo / Les Musiciens du Louvre / Marc Minkowski OFFENBACH Romantique

Familiarity with the famous galop from Orphée aux enfers and the finale of La Vie parisienne has tended to obscure Offenbach's early career. Failing to see the wood for the trees, we have all too often forgotten that before creating the French opéra bouffe, Offenbach was one of the greatest cellists of his day, and that far from restricting himself to making his Parisian audiences laugh, he was also an impassioned Romantic gifted with an astonishing melodic vein. His grand opera Die Rheinnixen, the delicate Fantasio, Les Contes d'Hoffmann of course, as well as the works included in the present release should be enough to convince listeners of this claim's validity.

Thanks to his almost fiendish virtuosity, Offenbach was known to his contemporaries as the "Liszt of the cello". Indeed, he even appeared on the same concert platform as Liszt, as well as with Anton Rubinstein and Friedrich von Flotow, both in Paris and in his native Germany. It was Offenbach, too, who introduced Beethoven's cello sonatas to France. But above and beyond the pleasure that he took in performing the music of others, his true passion was composition, and from a very early age he produced an impressive corpus of works for his favourite instrument, writing not only many shorter pieces but also countless studies and fantasias and a number of larger orchestral works, chief among which are a Danse bohémienne, a Grande Scène espagnole and, above all, the tremendous Concerto militaire, here recorded complete for the first time.

Offenbach himself gave the first performance of the concerto's opening movement at the Salle Moreau-Sainti in Paris on 24 April 1847 - it is unclear why the remaining movements were not performed at that time. It is likely that Offenbach played the work on a number of later occasions, although the only fully documented performance took place in Cologne on 24 October 1848. The work then fell into obscurity and it was not until a century later that the composer's grandson, Jacques Brindejont-Offenbach, unearthed it and entrusted the autograph score of the opening movement, together with a number of surviving piano sketches, to the cellist Jean-Max Clément. Clément prepared a new edition of the score based on these various sources, reserving for himself the right to perform the piece in the concert hall. He did what he could to reconstruct the second and third movements, which he orchestrated on the basis of the original piano sketches, while taking certain liberties with the material. In particular, he cut a number of passages in the opening movement that he judged to be too difficult.

In fact, both Clément and Jacques Brindejont-Offenbach were unaware that autograph copies of the Andante and final movement were lodged in the family archives, in both cases completed and orchestrated by Offenbach himself. Admittedly, neither manuscript was meaningfully headed and the introductions to both movements had been substantially developed and changed when compared to the piano sketches, so that it is difficult to detect any connection between the different pieces in the jigsaw without a detailed study of the sources.

The present recording begins and ends with two works - the rhapsodic overture to Orphée aux enfers (1874) and the "Snowflake Ballet" from Le Voyage dans la lune (1875) - that both bear witness to one of the most successful periods in Offenbach's life. By now he had become director of the Théâtre de la Gaîté, one of the most beautiful halls in Paris, and he finally had at his disposal a full-size orchestra with a proper pit and a genuine corps de ballet. He now revised two of his earliest successes - Orphée aux enfers and Geneviève de Brabant - to take account of these magnificent new surroundings and to offer his astonished audiences an entirely new type of opera, the opéra-bouffe féerie, a fairytale light opera in which nothing was too sensational - a work designed to fill his audiences with a sense of genuine wonderment. Pictorial poetry and Bacchian euphoria are combined in these snowflakes, which suffice to prove that the composer had no need of a pseudo-cancan, of a Gaîté parisienne or of assiduous arrangers to create orchestral magic. May the present recording contribute to the revival of an authentic Offenbach. (Jean-Christophe Keck)