This disc was originally
made in connection with the centenary
of Chausson’s death in 1999 and succeeds
by variety of programming – vocal items
alternating with purely instrumental
ones – in overcoming the problem that,
while Chausson is undoubtedly an important
composer, a little of his fin de
siècle hothouse atmosphere
can go a long way.
It also overcomes this
problem by including two outright masterpieces,
the Concert and La Chanson
perpétuelle in its pregnantly
evocative version with piano and string
quartet accompaniment. The Concert
is like no other music I know. Though
introspective and doom-laden as ever,
it also has great power, an instinctive
sense of form and extracts sonorities
of incredible richness from a mere six
players. The Ensemble Ader absolutely
have the measure of it. If you have
fallen in love with Franck’s Violin
Sonata or Piano Quintet, or Fauré’s
early chamber works, or Chausson’s own
Poème de l’amour et la mer,
and are wondering what to hear next,
I am sure you will enjoy this.
The Ensemble also distils
the haunting, restless atmosphere of
La Chanson perpétuelle,
abetted by Bernarda Fink’s finely spun
line. A quite different sort of performance
is heard from Ann Murray, Graham Johnson
and the Chilingirian Quartet on the
Hyperion two-disc set of Chausson’s
complete Mélodies. They
avoid too tragic a tone, adopting a
gently wafting, ethereal manner, and
taking 06:48, almost a minute less than
the Ader’s 07:41. These seem genuine
alternatives, and are both happy in
having the right voice-type for their
respective views. Avoid, though, the
Jessye Norman version, where pianist
Michel Dalberto pitches in at a heavy
forte (the marking is piano) and Norman
sings (too closely-miked) with billowing
operatic address. Magnificent singing
as such, it is a prima donna performance
and such is not called for here.
The op. 36 Mélodies
also offer distinct alternatives
to the Hyperion readings. The first,
Cantique à l’épouse,
is given there to a baritone, and it
does indeed seem logical that a "Song
to the wife" should be sung by
a man though, as so often in Lieder
and Mélodies, one will willingly
suspend disbelief if the performance
is a good one. Chris Pedro Trakas sings
in an intimate, floating head voice
(until I looked at the booklet credits
I actually took him to be a light tenor)
against Johnson’s very delicate accompaniment.
Alice Ader plays with a deeper tone
and Bernarda Fink is more full-voiced.
Given the tessitura, a mezzo-soprano
would have to sing it this way,
so we could get some idea of which approach
Chausson might have preferred if we
knew what voice-type he had in mind
when he wrote it (we do know that the
dedicatee of the second song, Jeanne
Remacle, gave the first performance
of the two together, but Chausson was
by then dead). By a slight margin I
prefer the Hyperion, which avoids all
sense of heaviness, but in the second
song, Dans le forêt de charme
et de l’enchantement, allotted by
Johnson to Ann Murray, the alternatives
again seem genuine ones. A timing of
03:31 on Hyperion compared with the
present 02:28 is a big difference for
so short a piece. Murray and Johnson
are very calm indeed while Fink and
Ader find a degree of urgency in the
music. Chausson’s unhelpful marking
is simply Pas vite. Murray and
Johnson are certainly "not fast"
but Fink and Ader, while faster,
could hardly be defined as actually
fast. In other words, the composer’s
instructions seem to give room for both
interpretations and I find it impossible
to choose between them.
The Pièce
pour violoncello et piano seems
not to be one of the composer’s more
memorable inspirations, but it may grow
on you. In any case, I hope I have indicated
that there is more than enough here
to make this an important disc for those
exploring the riches of French music.
Texts of the songs are not supplied
and there is a note by Jean Gallois
which, though far from the worst of
its kind – it contains much genuine
information – adopts that slightly high-flown
style which sounds reasonable in a Latin
language but (as I know all too well
from my own experience) is almost impossible
to render into convincing English. All
the same, I think that the translator
John Tyler Tuttle might have shown more
stylistic awareness. No laws of syntax
are broken in the following sentence:
"The première was given
by Eugène Ysaÿe, to whom
the work is dedicated, under the auspices
of the ‘XX’, a courageous association
involved in modern art (painting, poetry,
music) and founded and directed by Octave
Maus (1856-1910), a lawyer mad about
music." But, coming at the end
of a sentence in a formal literary style,
the sudden bathetic introduction of
a colloquialism, "mad about music",
is inelegant to say the least.
Christopher Howell
Bernarda Fink (mezzo-soprano) (1, 3), Ensemble
Ader: Alice Ader (piano) (1-4), Christophe Poiget,
Marie Charvet, Christophe Ladrette (violins) (1,
4 – one of these doesn’t play in 1, but we are
not told which), Pascal Robault (viola) (1, 4),
Isabelle Veyrier (cello (1, 2, 4) 
