Once in a decade, given average theatregoing luck, a musical soars out at you across the orchestra to strike between the eyes as well as the ears. Les Miserables, is one such: a great blazing pageant of life and death at the barricades of political and social revolution in Victor Hugo's nineteenth-century France. But apart from Victor victorious, what matters about Les Miserables is that, Like Britten's Peter Grimes and Sondheim's Sweeney Todd and for that matter Verdi's Rigoletto, it sets out to redefine the limits of music theatre. Like them it is through-sung, and like them it tackles universal themes of social and domestic happiness in terms of individual despair.
   When the show first opened in a Parisian sports arena in 1980, its score by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg already seemed to consist of all the great marching songs that Edith Piaf never got around to singing. There is an energy and an operatic intensity here which exists in the work of no British composer past or present: the sense of a nation's history being challenged through trumpets and drums and guitars and violins and cellos. These songs, ranging from the joyous 'Master of the House' to the haunting 'Empty Chairs at Empty Tables' by way of twenty or so others, have now been filtered through the translations of two ex-London drama critics, Herbert Kretzmer (author of most of Aznavour's English hits as well as a couple of earlier West End musicals) and James Fenton (who did the recent and superb Rigoletto translation). Here are songs of love and war and death and restoration: patter songs, arias, duets and chorus numbers of dazzling inventiveness and variety. For this is not the French Oliver!, nor yet the musical Nicholas Nickleby, though it owes a certain debt to both. Rather it is a brilliantly guided tour of the 1200-page eternity that is Hugo's text, and indeed there is no way that in three orchestral hours we can ask for more than that.       
   That now traditional RSC walk down to the footlights is here, as is a Third Man chase through the sewers and an autumnal ending worthy of Cyrano de Bergerac: there are even a few lovable orphans faintly reminiscent of Annie, and the result is episodic, fragmentary and sometimes evocative of other shows and other countries. For no musical exists in a vacuum: just as John Napier's rich and rare set is made up of old treasures - chairs, tables, cartwheels, water barrels - so the whole production reflects what Nunn and his co-director John Caird have learned from Nickleby and Cats and their Shakespeare musicals.        
   But Les Miserables does more than draw on its own theatrical and political origins: like the best of Bernstein and Sondheim it also pushes the barriers of music theatre forward, so that it exists in the most dangerous area of the footlights. Like West Side Story, this show is not about glamour or success: and yet, as its score surges through the theatre and onto this recording, you are made aware time and again of how triumphantly the translation works in a framework somewhere at the boundaries of Dickens and Brecht.
   Les Miserables is everything the musical theatre ought to be doing: it relies on no scenic or choreographic gimmicks, no repetitive phrasing, no simplistic homilies. It is not even a star show, though there are superlative performances from the whole company led by Colm Wilkinson who recreates on Broadway his amazing portrayal of Jean Valjean. I believe that Les Miserables will live on in the West End and on Broadway for many years to come, and this epic recording captures all the excitement of this landmark in the history of the musical theatre.