Call it chanson, call it melodie, the French song continues to be one of the most popularly misunderstood genres of classical music. Abundant recorded evidence to the contrary, audiences still harbor the expectation that the French portion of a song recital will feature precious salon music, naughty saloon music or vaporous tunes that enact the morbid or the sublime in a package of impenetrable symbols packed in synesthetic, pastel harmonies. L'Heure Exquise: A French Songbook (Hyperion), Alice Coote's new recording of 23 of them, just may change all that, and none-too-soon.
Her pianist is Graham Johnson, the most encyclopedically scholarly, clear-headed (visionary, if you will) and artistically sensitive colleague in the song business. Because his work with the German Lied has been so comprehensive and insightful, many overlook (perhaps are unaware) that he has done the same service for the complete songs of Poulenc, Debussy and Faure, among others. You'll find all of those composers on this collection, and Graham's notes make it clear that he was instrumental in devising this illuminating and vastly enjoyable recital.
This is not usual Coote repertoire, which counterintuitively makes her something of an ideal proponent, innately avoiding the popular misperceptions. For the record, the night before I wrote this, she tore up a late-night London Prom with white-hot performances of Handel arias, the focus of her extraordinary Hyperion release of last year. (The Proms recital, also with Harry Bicket and The English Concert, is available online for another month; a word to the wise.)
If you took the songs by gay composers out of L'Heure Exquise, it would be an EP. The CD begins and ends with Francis Poulenc ("Les chemins de l'amour," "Voyage") and tucks in three more along the way. Reynaldo Hahn, an early lover of Marcel Proust before becoming his lifelong friend, gets four. Two more from Camille Saint-Saens, and you get the idea.
The epigraph for this CD is a quotation from Poulenc, which begins, "You will find sobriety and dolour in French music just as in German or Russian, but the French have a keener sense of proportion. We realize that somberness and good humor are not mutually exclusive." That's precisely what this disc offers start to finish, and in reverse order.
Coote could take her burnished mezzo, tuck it up farther into the sinuses and mask, and seduce the listener with sheer beauty of tone and execution. There's no end of passages along the way that knock you out, or could, with their intoxicating surface beauties. But Coote, it seems, would rather send the songs and their texts into the deeper chambers of your �" let's call it being.
The upbeat, breezy phrases of "Les chemins de l'amour," often sung as generic praise for the many crafty paths love takes, in her rendition signals that not all of them brim with unalloyed happiness. As Johnson's notes point out, this recital was arranged to show the "phases" of love, so there's a movement toward the way love chafes and, almost predictably often, ends in lament. To the musicians' credit, there's never a sense of impending doom, of an elevator of emotions headed down, but neither is it naive or sentimental about the full effects of Cupid's arrows.
Coote, much of whose repertoire is "trouser roles," captures the complex perceptions of the male speaker in Saint-Saens' "Soiree en mer," which contrasts the picture of his beloved's focus on the beauties of the sky and stars. When Coote sings the final couplet, "You can see God smiling,/While I see mankind weeping," she captures one of the most profound and sadly common of human sentiments. "Le temps des lilas," by the Wagner devotee Ernest Chausson, a song you may find surprisingly familiar, is a four-minute Tristan, with perfumes instead of potions, and these musicians don't flinch from it. The pleasures of this CD are manifold, the beauties nearly unbearable, but it never loses sight of that "keener sense of proportion" Poulenc so valued.
The newest CD from Stephen Layton's chorus Polyphony (Hyperion) is either untitled or called Polyphony. The disc begins and ends with iconic American choral works by Randall Thompson, but between them are compositions by a trio of gay American composers �" Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland and the at-least-bisexual Leonard Bernstein �" as important as their French counterparts across the pond.
Layton favors a dense choral weave recorded in a resonant acoustic, but it retains clarity even in the saturated sonorities. It's ideally suited to a work like Barber's Agnus Dei, a choral arrangement of his famous Adagio for Strings that loses none of its power to move in this potent reading.
The entire program is made of irresistible music exquisitely performed, and it's devised in a way that the CD doesn't outstay its welcome. Bernstein's 12-minute Missa Brevis �" a "late" work, from 1988, but on the burner for 33 years �" is direct and unlike much of his work except for its energy. Not surprising to SFS fans under MTT's long tutelage, Copland's music is the most "advanced," skillfully avoiding devotional cliche to provide music of unstinting power. Thompson's "Fare Well" is as rapturous a leave-taking as you could ask.