Gabrielle Ritter-Ciampi
shared something with tenor Miguel Villabella,
whose Malibran disc I’ve also reviewed;
near contemporaries they both had very
fine musical fathers and their careers,
which began in the same year, 1917,
followed the same rather local trajectory.
Esteemed within France neither travelled
far beyond it and theirs remained, in
the main, local talents. Local however
doesn’t necessarily mean inferior or
parochial as the cases of these two
singers quite adequately demonstrates.
Her father was the Italian Ezio Ciampi,
a tenor who had toured with Piatti and
set up a teaching studio in Paris. Her
uncle was pianist Theodore Ritter and
initially she trained as a pianist –
it wasn’t until she was sixteen that
she retrained as a singer. Her first
engagement was at the Trianon-Lyrique
in 1917 as Violetta but two years later
she was, just ahead of Villabella, at
the Opéra-Comique in Mozart.
Her Countess in the Marriage of Figaro
was held in the greatest esteem and
her career developed its own natural
momentum – she sang more Mozart under
Messager and Hahn (her Don was usually
Renaud) and in some of her few visits
outside France (for example at the 1932
Salzburg Festival) it was Mozart she
sang. She sang Louise, Marguerite, Manon,
the Marschallin, sang in Rameau as well
as Rosina, Gilda and Violetta. Like
Villabella she also espoused Aria Antiche
– though she never recorded any – and
as with him her career wound down after
the end of the Second War, though she
did give the premiere of Dona Irene
in Hahn’s Oui de jeunes filles in
1949. She died in 1974.
The vast majority of
her recordings were made for Pathé
and we get a selection made between
1923 and 1929. She was a light lyric
soprano with a fine though not transcendental
technique though one that sported great
flexibility. We can hear the solidity
of that technique in the opening Donizetti
and Meyerbeer; in the latter’s O
beau pays she shows off her upper
register to good effect as she does
her quick tight trills. There’s no great
power in the voice as such - despite
the technical achievement she doesn’t
project dominatingly – but it’s light
and even and a splendid instrument in
the chosen repertoire. She’s hampered
by the oom-pah accompaniment in Le Pardon
de Ploermel but there’s great fluidity
and nobility in her Mignon – though
she’s not always quite accurate in her
runs.
Poised and sustained
she excelled in showpiece arias - some
may well tax your musical patience here
– but her coquettish trills and accurate
intervals (not always but often) are
a pleasure to hear. She was a stylish
light French soprano whose daring embraced
Rode’s Variations, stupefyingly crass
as music but eventful to hear in vocal
guise, not least from her. Even she
is taxed by some of the demands of Massé’s
Le Carnaval de Venise – this is an outrageous
Paris Conservatory-type test piece and
reminds me of the clarinet test pieces
written there in the late nineteenth
century. Either because of the repertoire
or because of her own disposition, some
of these recordings do sound somewhat
neutral interpretatively though she’s
more engaging in La Bohème even
if she’s really too light and superficial
for Madame Butterfly. There’s an interesting
pendant. After the Rode and the coloratura
exploits we finish with Roussel’s Jazz
dans la nuit. Is this going to be crepuscular
and eerie? No, it’s actually a jaunty,
cocksure vamp, with heavy bass accents
and teasing rubato. Roussel’s the pianist.
It’s a shame that her
Come scoglio is absent because
her Così was famous and might
have rounded out her musical personality
rather more. Similarly a fine Rossini
was on Polydor 78s and is not here.
Still, the copies are very acceptable;
there may have been relatively minimal
intervention and the copies do have
the usual array of surface noise but
nothing traumatic. Notes are in the
current Malibran house style – minimal
– and they could be expanded with profit.
Otherwise, this is a more than welcome
tribute to Ritter-Ciampi, and is part
of a similarly fine collection of similar
retrievals from this company.
Jonathan Woolf
Gabrielle Ritter-Ciampi (soprano) 