‘Chère nuit’ ‘French Songs’ Bachelet Chère nuit Canteloube O up! Chaminade L’amour captif. La lune paresseuse. Ronde d’amour Debussy Apparition. En sourdine. La romance d’Ariel Messiaen Trois Mélodies Poulenc Les chemins de l’amour. Métamorphoses Ravel Shéhérazade Satie La diva de ‘l’Empire’. Je te veux Viardot Les deux roses. Haï luli!. Havanaise Yvain Je chante la nuit Louise Alder sop Joseph Middleton pf Chandos F CHAN20222 (80’ • DDD • T/t)

Here’s a peach of a recital disc, wonderfully programmed. Louise

Alder and Joseph Middleton begin with the familiar – Ravel’s perfumed Shéhérazade – and then segue into the byways of the French mélodie repertoire, much of it seldom heard, including Pauline Viardot, Cécile Chaminade and Alfred Bachelet.

Shéhérazade is usually recorded with orchestra, although its most winning recent recordings have been with piano – Marianne Crebassa (with Fazıl Say – Erato, 12/17) and Fatma Said (with Malcolm Martineau – Erato, 12/20). In ‘Asie’, Alder proves an eager voyager, with a real sense of longing in her repeated ‘je voudrais’ sighing phrases. Her tone is bright, though not as shiny as Said’s more silvery soprano, but her delivery of Tristan Klingsor’s heady texts is just as animated. If Crebassa’s dusky, veiled tones prove more alluring, that’s the natural advantage of mezzos in this cycle. Ravel’s orchestral colours are most keenly missed in ‘La flûte enchantée’ – no real flute (or ney, in Said’s case) snuck in here – but Middleton’s mellifluous playing is persuasive.

The piano accompaniments are sparer in the first two Messiaen songs, where Alder draws the listener into a more intimate atmosphere, ‘Le sourire’ trailing off into nothing. Once we get to ‘La fiancée perdue’, however, we bathe in Messiaen’s familiar religious glitter. At piano and pianissimo, Alder’s soprano possesses a lovely range of pastel colours – those half-sung, half-whispered confessions in Debussy’s ‘Apparition’ are exquisite, with a lovely ‘float’ on the penultimate line, ‘Passait, laissant toujours’. The voice occasionally hardens (close microphone placement?) at the top, such as in ‘La romance d’Ariel’. The trio of Pauline Viardot songs are superb, particularly ‘Haï luli!’, and the ‘Havanaise’ has a sexy, seductive lilt.

Alder does humour well – Wigmore Hall will surely never be the same after she released her breasts (pink balloons!) in an aria from Les mamelles de Tirésias in a recent recital – and she has a lot of fun in Canteloube’s ‘O up!’. Her relaxed delivery of the Poulenc and Satie numbers is a fine example of her engaging, communicative style.

Alfred Bachelet was a French composer and conductor who received the 1890 Grand Prix de Rome for his cantata Cléopâtre. He conducted at the Paris Opéra before serving as director of the Nancy Conservatoire. His worklist is negligible; but the song ‘Chère nuit’, a setting of Eugène Adénis-Colombeau composed in 1897, is a gem of a discovery. Alder welcomes the setting of the sun and the sweet scents of the garden as night descends in long, ecstatic phrases, sensitively echoed by Middleton’s piano. It’s truly deserving of the title-track in this beguiling recital. Mark Pullinger

‘Nostalgia’ Bartók Village Scenes, Sz78 Brahms Acht Lieder, Op 57 – No 4, Ach, wende diesen Blick; No 8, Unbewegte laue Luft. Neun Lieder, Op 63 – No 5, Meine Liebe ist grün; No 8, Heimweh II. Fünf Lieder, Op 107 – No 3, Das Mädchen spricht; No 5, Mädchenlied. Anklänge, Op 7 No 3. Bei dir sind meine Gedanken, Op 95 No 2. Meerfahrt, Op 96 No 4. Nachtigall, Op 97 No 1. Der Schmied, Op 19 No 4. Vergebliches Ständchen, Op 84 No 4. Verzagen, Op 72 No 4. Von ewiger Liebe, Op 43 No 1 Mussorgsky The Nursery Magdalena Kožená mez Yefim Bronfman pf Pentatone F PTC5186 777 (64’ • DDD • T/t)

On the face of it, the three composers represented on Magdalena KoΩená’s latest album have next to nothing in common. Pentatone’s title ‘Nostalgia’ might be apt enough for the Brahms selection, though without nostalgia the whole German song edifice would collapse. What links KoΩená’s choices, as Laura Tunbridge points out in an illuminating note, is that each of the three composers draws on and transforms European folk traditions. In Village Scenes Bartók puts an acerbic slant on Slovakian folk tunes to create a miniature rustic Frauenliebe und -leben: no tragic ending here, but no rapt hero-worship either. As you might guess, the Czech mezzo is in prime form in songs that could have been written for her. She catches every mood and inflection with spontaneous immediacy, from the simple tenderness of ‘The Bride’ to the mordant humour and growing delirium of ‘Wedding’, abetted by Yefim Bronfman’s brilliant, boldly coloured pianism.

The lurking threat of the big bad wolf links the last of the Village Scenes to The Nursery, Mussorgsky’s affectionate but utterly unsentimental (and un-nostalgic) ‘scenes from childhood’. Again, KoΩená is in her element. Avoiding the twin traps of caricature and winsomeness, she displays a delightful comic touch, whether in the child’s wheedling self-pity in ‘In the Corner’ or the mounting confusion of ‘Bedtime Prayer’. She deftly characterises the exasperated nurse, and finds a velvet warmth for the mother in ‘The Hobby Horse’. Crucially, too, KoΩená also musters the purity and soprano lightness for little Misha, by turns endearingly innocent, manipulative and plain malicious. She and Bronfman have a natural feeling for pace, and understand that Mussorgsky’s vocal lines often approximate to heightened speech. Yet she never compromises vocal production for dramatic effect. Mussorgsky’s artistic credo was ‘Truth before Beauty’. With KoΩená we get both.

There are many lovely things in her Brahms selection, centring, inevitably with this composer, on songs of loss, longing and disenchantment. Occasionally the spirit lightens, though for my taste not quite enough in a subdued ‘Vergebliches Ständchen’ (where the boy seems resigned to rejection from the outset) or in ‘Der Schmied’, which has the requisite keyboard muscle but at this deliberate tempo sounds stolid, devoid of a bright Ländler lilt.

These are, though, rare disappointments. Throughout these songs KoΩená always cares for a true singing line, taking wide leaps gracefully, never bulging or bumping. From its tense, twilit opening, through the girl’s hushed, tender ‘Our love will not be sundered’ to the fervent yet contained climax, ‘Von ewiger Liebe’ is as moving as one always hopes. Other specially memorable performances include the strange, almost impressionistic barcarolle ‘Meerfahrt’, sung by KoΩená with a haunted intensity, and her burning directness in ‘Ach, wende diesen Blick’ and ‘Unbewegte laue Luft’, songs whose overt sexual passion shocked some of Brahms’s friends. Some of this music, above all the storm-swept ‘Verzagen’ (which Clara Schumann enjoyed playing), demands a virtuoso’s touch. Bronfman, a pianist partner matching KoΩená in poetic sensitivity, is more than equal to Brahms’s challenges. Richard Wigmore

58 GRAMOPHONE 58 GRAMOPHONE SHORTLIST 2022

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