French Song Recital
Prestonkirk Parish Church, 10/9/24
Véronique Gens (soprano), Joseph Middleton (piano)
When I read that the fabulous French soprano, Véronique Gens, was giving a recital at this year’s Lammermuir Festival, I made sure that this was top of my list of concerts which I wanted to review. I was in no way disappointed!
Not only is she one of the finest sopranos of her generation (a statement one reads far too often in artists’ biographies, but entirely appropriate here), but I had the privilege and pleasure to sing with her in the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 2001, in one of the great productions of Mozart’s ‘The Marriage of Figaro’. Ms Gens sang the Countess, while I sang Doctor Bartolo, in a production by Sir Richard Eyre, conducted by Marc Minkowski, with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, as part of a star-studded cast including Magdalena Kožená, Camilla Tilling, Laurent Naouri and Jennifer Smith. Her Countess was performed to perfection, with glorious singing and a vulnerable, deeply-moving interpretation. I have sung in many ‘Figaros’ with many famous Countesses, but Ms Gens remains my favourite.
As an interpreter of French song, she has become renowned as a peerless performer, and even after a long career, the voice is in excellent condition and her recital was superb. It is quite a coup for the Lammermuir Festival to be able to include her in their programme, and it was unsurprising to me that the lovely Prestonkirk Parish Church in East Linton was packed for this recital. Her accompanist was the incomparable Joseph Middleton, who I last saw accompanying Dame Sarah Connolly at the Paxton Festival a couple of years ago. He plays both sensitively and dramatically, and it was clear from the beginning that the two performers had a terrific rapport with each other.
The recital played without an interval for over an hour, and we were treated to a masterclass in the interpretation of the French mélodie, particularly that of the Belle Époque, from the end of the Franco-Prussian War to the beginning of the First World War, featuring songs by Gounod, Chausson, Hahn, Fauré and Duparc.
We started with Charles Gounod (1818-93), famous for the opera ‘Faust’, but also hugely influential for the younger generation of French song composers. His charming ‘Où voulez-vous aller?’, a setting of a poem by Théophile Gautier, inviting us to travel to exotic destinations, set the mood for the recital, with Mr Middleton’s accompaniment as if on a rocking boat, over which Ms Gens tells of the wondrous lands and oceans which will offer love unconfined.
Gounod led on to Edmond de Polignac, an extraordinary, aristocratic figure, who, although homosexual, was married to the amazing Winnaretta Singer (heiress to the Sewing Machine fortune), and who together sponsored and encouraged many young French composers, through their salons in Paris. He was a fine composer in his own right, and we heard his setting of another Gautier gem, ‘Lamento’, an outpouring of melancholy yearning. Ms Gens captured the glorious Frenchness of the sentiment and the poetry, and poured out waves of ravishing sounds, always faithfully partnered by the stylish playing of Mr Middleton.
We heard a selection of songs by Ernest Chausson and Reynaldo Hahn, continuing the exploration of Belle Époque song writing. Hahn was an interesting character, born in Venezuela in 1875 but taken to France as a child, the youngest son of a German Jewish father and a Venezuelan mother of mixed Spanish, Dutch and English ancestry. Brought up multi-lingually, he became, as one contemporary noted, more French than the French, and, in Paris, he mixed with the highest circles of society, both aristocratic and artistic. The family were friends of Princess Mathilde, niece of Napoleon, and Sarah Bernhardt and Marcel Proust, and the young Reynaldo, having shown musical prowess, was able to study with Gounod, Massenet and Saint-Saëns!
Hahn was a prolific song writer, and with his connections to Proust (who was for a couple of years a lover), Mallarmé and Verlaine, among others, he had incomparable access to poetry direct from the muses. His work was neglected for a while after his death in 1947, but with the coming of the Millennium, he has become very popular again, and Ms Gens treated us to eleven of his mélodies, and indeed two encores as well. My favourite was the last of the recital, ‘Le Printemps’ (Spring), in which the two performers very much followed Hahn’s instructions in the score, ‘avec enthousiasme’! Mr Middleton’s playing reached heights of excitement and Ms Gens displayed the full range of her phenomenal soprano voice - ‘Te Voila, rire du Printemps!’ (Smiling Spring! You have arrived!’). On the first full evening of a Scottish autumn, these were welcome words indeed.
For me, the greatest songs in the recital were by Fauré and Duparc.
Gabriel Fauré’s ‘Les Berceaux’, a setting of a poem by Sully Prudhomme, always affects me in its descriptions of the wives of fisherman rocking their cradles as their menfolk set out to sea, neither knowing if they will return. Ms Gens was magnificent in the gentle beginning and in the terrifying climax, as the full force of the sea breaks over the participants.
Since I was at Music College, I have loved Henri Duparc’s ‘L’Invitation au Voyage’, a tremendous setting of a great poem by Charles Baudelaire, an invitation to travel to exotic lands far away, where ‘Tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté, Luxe, Calme et Volupté!’ (‘where nothing but order and beauty dwell, Abundance, Calm and Sensuous Delight!’). Duparc’s music, bringing out all the sensuality of the words is a marvel, as was the performance.
It was a great thrill to see and hear Ms Gens again, her tall elegant figure in a beautiful black and yellow dress, and to admire the poise and delicacy of her singing. The over-mannered Danish singer from the concert by Concerto Copenhagen the night before would have learned everything about recital presentation from this evening’s star guest. A Lammermuir Jewel!
