For American lovers of singing, late summer can be a dry spell, best deployed to clear the ears from the extreme singing that is opera, since more is coming. Between the broadcasts and livestreams from the big European festivals, my ears have wandered to two singular new recordings of 17th-century vocal music that have cast a spell on me. This being early Baroque, there's the genderfuck just under the surface of these performances that adds its own kind of aural frisson.
The French mezzo-soprano Lucile Richardot has the lowest female voice I've heard since Vivica Genaux, who can without effort sound like a bass. With Richardot, it's a sort of an inverted-gender effect; she sounds more like a countertenor than most countertenors sound like altos, yet her voice has depth and penetration few of her male counterparts achieve.
On "Perpetual Night" (Harmonia Mundi), she joins Sebastien Douce's superb Ensemble Correspondences for a beautifully programed selection of "ayres" and songs from 17th-century England, in the two traditions of Dowland songs and Purcell arias, as Douce points out in his accompanying notes.
The title "Perpetual Night" alerts you to the fact that the repertoire will lean toward the Dowland "Flow my tears" sensibility, but the fare is varied in a way that feels both natural and leavening. There are two purely instrument tracks that provide further ear-soothing at perfectly timed intervals.
The CD opens with Robert Johnson's "Care-charming sleep," a melismatic, strophic song that hymns the healing power of sleep without the edge of complaint heard in Handel's "O sleep, why dost thou leave me?" Richardot's tone becomes steadily more imploring throughout the piece. With each verse we're invited deeper into her consciousness as expressed in richly modulated singing.
The more emphatic, declamatory style of the next song is by William Lawes, who gets three here, and will be among the more familiar composer names. His "Whiles I thinks standing lake" provides immediate assurance that this group of songs will not be unrelievedly dour, though there will be ample "tears" along its route. It would take a scholar to fully unpack the text of the third, "Go, happy man," but it has that light, tripping sound that could imitate the feelings of a woman just having sent off a satisfied man.
Richardot's voice commands attention from the beginning but also burrows into your inner ear, making deep emotional private places resonate, free of the peskiness of the ordinary earworm. The recital reaches its peak with Purcell's "When Orpheus sang," but Douce has the sense to let it taper away with John Blow's "Epilogue: Sing, sing, ye Muses." I usually just let it keep playing.
Fans of the French Baroque probably already have a favorite rendering of the Holy Week "Lecons de tenebres." Drawn on the lamentations of the Biblical Jeremiah, the Lecons are the musical ground zero of Catholic solemnity, but by the time of the Couperins, some sensuality, of a spiritual sort, enters in and works those wiles.
The out French singer (tenor-baritone; he's a Pelleas) Marc Mauillon has launched his most ambitious project to date with the first cycle of the "Lecons," composed for the court of Louis XIV in 1662-63 by Michel Lambert (Harmonia Mundi) and likely the earliest musical setting of the Lecons we have. As realized here, it's far more austere than its successors, but its meditative quality packs its own power.
You don't hear the grinding work that went into this recording of a "score" with barely any precise, set melodic or harmonic indications. Mauillon, in tenor mode, is accompanied only by harpsichord, gamba and theorbo, playing in complete, enlivening sync. The very sparseness quickly becomes addictive, erasing clock time.
A singer with a broad repertoire, Mauillon's sound here is more acerbic than in opera roles and may require some adjustment on the listener's part. But, like Richardot's, it has a deep, resilient core that asks the listener only to let it in to acquire its own entrancing kind of pull.
There are keen minds at work here. The copious embellishments are improvised, yet dispatched so nimbly that the sound is not artificial but, in the manner of the Gregorian chant that underlies it, replete with the fullness of spirit.
This project pushes out the boundaries of what we understand as Baroque. Living 200 meters from an active mosque, I hear a muezzin chant the call to prayer throughout the day. Until I heard Mauillon's singing this Lambert, that has been the grounding music of my daily life. These Lambert "Lecons," too, have to be heard if you're to believe.