Ernest Chausson is a composer whose true worth is often overlooked.
Even his most famous work - the violin and orchestra
Poème
- is more likely to turn up on disc rather than in the concert
hall. His catalogue is small but every one in it is a gem. To
my ear he is the French composer who most successfully reconciles
the conflicting influences of Wagner, the academic rigour of the
Schola Cantorum and early impressionism. His big and luxuriant
opera
Le Roi Arthus is a fine example of this finely achieved
balance but on a smaller scale the
Poème de l’amour
et de la mer Op.19 is his most sensuous and skilfully crafted
work. Again it is more often heard on disc than the concert hall;
over the years it has received recordings from many of the greatest
sopranos and mezzo-sopranos. Therein lies one of the little question-marks
about the work - the type of voice best suited. Whether to go
for the full-blooded drama of a Jessye Norman, or the rich intelligent
warmth of a Janet Baker. But curiouser and curiouser; Chausson
in his score - as ever I’ve turned to the wonderful IMSLP
site for access to scores I do not own hard copies of - marks
the solo part for a baritone. This would seem to be logical as
the poems by Maurice Bouchor are written from a male standpoint.
Yet there seems have only ever been a single recording by a male
singer and a tenor at that! This was a recent performance from
the Australian tenor Steven Davislim - very well received here
just last December. I have heard it and found the orchestra and
recording superb and the use of the male voice utterly convincing
but for my taste Davislim’s timbre is too unidiomatically
not French and his actual pronunciation lacked conviction.
The dreaded ‘USP’ of this performance is that is utilises
a new transcription of the work for a chamber ensemble of voice,
piano and string quartet. The argument for this is that it neatly
makes a companion piece in this format for the stunning
Chanson
Perpétuelle. Given the sumptuousness of the original
there is a secondary argument that it allows for a smaller more
lyrical voice in turn revealing more subtleties than the original
orchestration always permits. A smaller voice is certainly what
soprano Salomé Haller has. One last little textual query
here; although a soprano Haller chooses the lower pitches for
the songs - as in the printed vocal score - as opposed to the
higher pitches in the full score. Given that the difference is
only a tone it does not make for a huge audible change. Pianist
Nicolas Kruger in the liner-note makes a case for this transcription
he and Haller commissioned from Franck Villard in that it expands
the repertoire for this under-used combination of voice and instruments.
That is certainly true to a degree although British composers
seem to have responded to this format more with Vaughan Williams’
On Wenlock Edge being the most famous example. The performance
starts well with the virtues of the disc as a whole immediately
apparent. The Quatuor Manfred have a clean and lean sound and
all the parts are well recorded and balanced in the Parisian Church
acoustic. Villard has rightly made a virtue out of the reduced
scale so lines and textures are beautifully clear. In turn this
does suit and match the light-tones Ms Haller. But, and it really
is a big but, this is a piece that takes hedonistic delight in
the sensuous richness of the orchestral palette for which it was
conceived. The very end of the first song finds the players, for
all their undoubted skill, simply under-powered. The passages
where the textures are light and thin are ravishing - the opening
is an excellent example as is the instrumental
Interlude
which benefits from the chilly grey tone the players impart
.
Credit too to the first violin who makes light of some fairly
fiendish passage work which ripples beautifully on a flute or
harp but is just darn right hard on the violin. Special mention
too for the piano playing of Nicolas Kruger which is a perfect
blend of subtle touch and sensitive accompanying. In its own right
this is an elegant and pleasing performance even though I don’t
personally find Ms Haller’s voice as purely beautiful as
I would prefer in this work. However, in no way does this supplant
the original work so it would be hard if not wrong to direct collectors
to this edition before the orchestral version.
Likewise with the coupling of the unfinished
String Quartet
this would not be a choice above all others. My introduction to
this work was on an EMI import coupling this work with Chausson’s
other famous chamber work the
Concerto for Violin, Piano, and
String Quartet played by Augustin Dumay, Jean-Philippe Collard
and the Muir Quartet. From memory I think this won awards at the
time of its release in the late 1980s. Good though the Quatuor
Manfred are here the Muir are better with a richer, more skilfully
blended more subtly voiced version. Next to them the Manfred’s
- fine players though they are, this is a matter of degree - sound
a little wan. Don’t forget this is not wholly ‘authentic’
Chausson either. Still the only famous composer to die as a result
of a bicycle accident this work was left incomplete - the 4
th
movement existing in sketches only. The near-complete three movements
were edited and organised for performance by his old friend and
colleague Vincent D’Indy. Who, it has to be said, did a
very fine job because except for some formal imbalance that the
missing finale would have solved, you have little or no sense
of where Chausson ends and D’Indy begins. The very opening
of the quartet shows the difference in approach between the Muirs
and the Manfreds; the Muirs richer, more sensuous, more questing.
In contrast the Manfreds - by choice I’m sure - are more
questioning, less certain, lighter toned and with fractionally
less perfect ensemble too. Perhaps because I ‘learnt’
the work through the former I find myself resistant to the latter.
In either case, this is a fine quartet and well worth discovering
if it has escaped your attention so far. The version here is a
worthy one yet lacking the last ounce of sheer attack.
The
Chanson Perpétuelle is a miniature masterpiece
and receives the best performance on the disc. Hearing the perfection
of the scoring here does underline the fundamental error of the
earlier transcription. Chausson scores this work to perfection
and it receives a performance of gentle subtlety. Haller sounds
much more comfortable here not so obviously fighting the climaxes
although her tone still hardens less than agreeably at high climaxes
[track 7 6:20]. Again, Kruger’s piano playing is an understated
delight and the quartet find just the right lyrical warmth. Even
on disc this has hardly received the attention its quality deserves
in the main I’m sure to do with the problem of programming
it onto a disc of similar works. The logic in the coupling here
is that Chausson worked on the
Quartet and the
Chanson
Perpétuelle concurrently. Indeed the song is his last
completed work before he died at just 44 years old. It is hard
not to wonder what path his music would have taken if he had lived
through to the 1920s.
This is a tricky disc to summarise in one pithy sentence: well
recorded and produced, well thought out and in the main well performed
but ultimately not the disc to buy if your collection has room
for only one version of any of the works here presented with the
possible exception of the
Chanson Perpétuelle.
Nick Barnard