GRAMOPHONE AWARDS SHORTLIST 2018
life of a shepherd leading his herd (sic!) to pasture. It’s curious that Lucie de Lammermoor doesn’t get a look-in, as Duprez certainly sang his part in French as well as Italian.
Like Dorus-Gras, Joyce El‑Khoury takes the part of both Isabelle and Alice in Robert le diable. She is particularly suited to the gentle Alice, whose ‘Va, dit-elle’ anticipates Micaëla’s ‘Et tu lui diras’ in Carmen by more than 40 years. Mathilde’s air from Guillaume Tell is just as simple and unaffected. El‑Khoury catches Agathe’s tenderness in ‘Ma prière’ (‘Leise, leise’) from Le Freyschütz and phrases ‘I miei sospiri’ in Lucia to perfection (not quite matched by Spyres). Sometimes she sacrifices her consonants to beauty of tone: not too serious a drawback. Carlo Rizzi and the Hallé provide lively accompaniments, with some fine solos. Both discs are a must for lovers of the repertoire. Richard Lawrence (10/17)
‘Mirages’ Berlioz La mort d’Ophéliea Debussy Pelléas et Mélisande – Mes longs cheveux descendent. La romance d’Ariela Delage Quatre Poèmes hindous Delibes Lakmé – Bell Song; Flower Duetb; Tu m’as donné le plus douz rêve Koechlin Le voyage, Op 84 No 2a Massenet Thaïs – Celle qui vient est plus bellec Messager Madame Chrysanthème – Le jour sous le soleil béni Stravinsky Le rossignol – Chanson du Rossignol Thomas Hamlet – À vos jeux, mes amis Sabine Devieilhe sop with cJodie Devos sop bc Marianne Crebassa mez aAlexandre Tharaud pf Les Siècles / François-Xavier Roth Erato F 9029 57677-2 (64’ • DDD) Includes texts and translations
You’d be forgiven for assuming that this release, featuring a French coloratura soprano in repertoire that includes the Hamlet Mad Scene, an extract from Thaïs and hit numbers from Lakmé, might be a conventional affair. You’d be wrong. As a quick glance down the rest of the track-listing shows, this adventurous programme places those familiar showpieces into the most fascinating of contexts, exploring, to quote Sabine Devieilhe’s brief note in the booklet, ‘the fantasy image of a different country’ that was such an obsession in fin de siècle France.
Those Lakmé numbers can rarely have sounded fresher or more original, with Devieilhe joined by Marianne Crebassa in a supremely seductive account of the Flower Duet and offering some breathtaking coloratura in the Bell Song. And the latter,
in particular, is heard in an entirely different light when juxtaposed with Maurice Delage’s remarkable Quatres Poèmes hindous (1912) – almost ethnographic in their attempts to capture the strange sounds of an exotic world.
Similarly, the programme underlines that weird orientalist episode that turns up half way through Ophélie’s Mad Scene (at 7’20” here) and forces one to hear Thaïs’s charmeuse afresh – we have just that small episode from Massenet’s wonderful score, rather than any of the title character’s numbers. Stravinsky makes a guest appearance with the brief Nightingale’s Song from Le rossignol, here in its French version.
‘Le voyage’ from Charles Koechlin’s voice-and-piano setting of Tristan Klingsor’s Shéhérazade poems serves as a beguiling intermediary palate-cleanser, as do Berlioz’s own delicate La mort d’Ophélie and Debussy’s Le romance d’Ariel – all three are superbly accompanied by Alexandre Tharaud. The briefest wisp of Pelléas et Mélisande – sung with disarming artlessness – takes us into another strange, distant world between the different easts evoked by Messager and Delibes, minimal gaps between tracks allowing them almost to blend into one another.
The performances themselves are terrific. François-Xavier Roth exploits the period instruments of Les Siècles to emphasise the sheer variety of orchestral colours on display (captured in excellent sound) and accompanies with sensitivity. Devieilhe, meanwhile, has a wonderfully instinctive and apparently effortless way with this music. The voice is on the light side but marries seductive delicacy with astonishing pinpoint accuracy, as well as an ability to turn on a sixpence from cool, quasi-instrumental purity to seductive warmth. All in all, this refreshing, fascinating and beguiling album is impossible to resist. Highly recommended. Hugo Shirley (12/17)
‘Visions’ Bizet Clovis et Clotilde – Prière, ô doux souffle de l’ange! Bruneau Geneviève – Seigneur! Est-ce bien moi que vous avez choisie? David Lalla-Roukh – Sous le feuillage sombre Février Gismonda – Dit-elle vrai? Franck Les Béatitudes – Moi, du Sauveur je suis la Mère. Rédemption – Le flot se lève Godard Les Guelfes – Là-bas, vers le palais Halévy La magicienne – Ce sentier vous conduit vers le couvent voisin Massenet – La Vierge – Le dernier sommeil de la Vierge: Extase de la Vierge Niedermeyer Stradella – Ah!…Quel songe affreux! Saint-Saëns Étienne Marcel – Ah! Laissez-moi, ma mère! Véronique Gens sop Munich Radio Orchestra / Hervé Niquet Alpha F ALPHA279 (56’ • DDD) Includes texts and translation
This tremendous, heady disc finds Véronique Gens and Hervé Niquet examining sub-cults of visionaries, saints and mystics in some of the less familiar 19th- and early 20th-century French operas and oratorios. It’s provocative stuff, its emotional – at times emotive – impact immeasurably heightened by very careful programming. Gens opens with Bruneau’s Geneviève – heroine of his eponymous 1881 Prix de Rome cantata – responding, Joan of Arc-like, to a divine call to save France from its enemies, then broadens the psychological terrain to encompass the Gothic frissons of Niedermeyer’s Stradella and the mystico-erotic contemplation of a very human lover in Godard’s Les Guelfes. The climax is reached with Massenet’s depiction of the Virgin Mary’s ecstatic vision of Paradise after the Assumption, a disquietingly sensual passage, given the context, that balletomanes will recognise at once as the final pas de deux from Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon. Thereafter the mood becomes calmer and the recital closes with reflections on the efficacy of prayer from Bizet’s Clovis et Clotilde (another Prix de Rome cantata) and Franck’s Rédemption.
Gens and Niquet throw themselves into all this with an engrossing mix of abandon and restraint. Gens’s trademark combination of purity of utterance and smoky tone speaks volumes in a repertory in which ‘religion [is] the palliative for carnal love’, as the booklet notes put it. Much of the time, she’s sparing and introverted, which means that the big emotional outpourings are all the more overwhelming when we reach them. In Bizet, Godard and the Virgin Mary’s aria from Les Béatitudes, it’s the long-breathed, hovering lines that send shivers down your spine. But real turmoil erupts when Léonor, the heroine of Stradella, wakes from a terrifying nightmare and senses she is being punished by an inscrutable God. And the way Gens’s voice surges in rapture through the Massenet is simply breathtaking. Niquet is just as committed, just as insightful, and the Munich Radio Orchestra’s contribution is first rate. At 56 minutes, the disc is on the short side, but any more would, I suspect, feel like overkill. I also found the emotional trajectory gains even greater force from reversing the playing order of the last two tracks, ending with Bizet rather than Franck. It’s a spectacular achievement, though: whatever you do, don’t hold back. Tim Ashley (7/17)
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GRAMOPHONE SHORTLIST 2018 39
