L'Enfant et les sortilèges (1925) - Ravel

Maurice Ravel's brief lyrical fantasy L'Enfant et les sortilèges (The Child and the Charms) was completed in 1925. Upon first seeing this performance from Glyndebourne I was shocked to find the enfant played - and sung - by a short middle-aged female! Not a boy by any stretch of the imagination; and this from Ravel of all people. So I quickly looked at the original score (included in our download) and discovered that yes indeed it - and presumably he - specified "mezzo-soprano". But come to think of it that neither specifies nor requires a gender. A troupe of dancing boys from the Trinity School Croydon does take part, and I should have thought any one of them would have been more suitable than Miss Gadelia (the above-mentioned middle-aged female). The part does not after all call for all that much singing. No more difficult than the Turn of the Screw, which was put on at the same theatre in a straightforward and clean-limbed way. The second disappointment of the evening comes from the negroisms with which the score is over-stuffed. These are not we suppose unexpected in a production from the nineteen-twenties, but they certainly detract from any claim to greatness or seriousness. The closest Brahms - a great and serious composer - came to negroisms was in his overture for an Academic Festival and his Hungarian dances, and he had no need to cross the Atlantic for either. So, all in all, this performance will be for the pleasure of in the main our lady members.

Wikipedia page (copy and paste):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'enfant_et_les_sortilèges
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Pass on THROUGH HERE to find the video and a score.