Musical anniversaries can be mixed gifts. Composer “Years,” which carry the possibility of deeper exposure to music less often heard, also have a way of creating program overkill. Tenor Nicky Spence just ushered out the “Gabriel Fauré Year” with an illuminating new recording of the composer’s song cycle, “Le bonne chanson” and other songs (Hyperion), and now has joined a distinguished group of colleagues to record, anew, the complete songs of Maurice Ravel under the matchless leadership of pianist Malcolm Martineau (Signum Classics).
The Fauré Year, “celebrating” the 100th anniversary of the composer’s death, has proved ideal, showing listeners rightly ensorceled by the pastel beauties of the Requiem and the “Pavane” with the works that reflect the “big” later music and the composer’s ventures into what could be called modernism, its adventurous chromaticism in particular. While Spence’s program includes music from all the Fauré “periods,” it begins with a version of “La bonne chanson” that will likely be new to most listeners.
It will also give Spence’s adoring audience a deeper sense of his way with accompanied songs. They have always been central to his work, but of late they have been somewhat overshadowed by the out, versatile tenor’s recent exploits with the title roles of Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes” and Edward Elgar’s “The Dream of Gerontius.” The latter has received particular praise for the tenor’s creation of a character who, for once, you don’t have to be British yourself to understand.
The good song
Set to poems by Paul Verlaine, “Le bonne chanson” is performed here not in the more often heard voice-and-piano version but in the composer’s own subsequent arrangement for voice, piano, and string quintet (1898), here the Patti Quartet with the outstanding pianist of the CD as a whole, Julius Drake. The arrangement put the already much-loved song cycle in the most creative period of the Parisian salon years.
The revised version relocates the songs on a cushion of softer, more variegated sound than is achievable with piano accompaniment alone. Among the many smaller changes it works on the originals, it imparts an enhanced eroticism to this cycle. The music reflects and is a product of the married Fauré’s love for –and affair with– the soprano Emma Bardac, who worked on the songs with the composer before singing their premiere.
Such secreting of an illicit affair within a larger composition is found throughout the history of music, most memorably that of Wagner and Janáček. What it unleashes in “La bonne chanson,” and the song “Le secret” in particular, is material of startlingly individual character and treatment of aspects of love from the heroic to the tragic.
Spence’s singing eats it up. His robust tenor encompasses a range of expression from the fervidly passionate to the more delicate, yearning, and evanescent expressions of intimacy. By the time you’ve heard his way with the music as a whole, you’ve really been somewhere. For a dip into the complexities of love as understood by Fauré and Spence, look no further than the magical “La lune blanche luit dans le bois.”
The other songs
The selection of songs that round out the recording does represent the many musical “faces” of Fauré. His “Venetian” song, “Mandoline,” finds Spence at his most nimble and light-spirited. At the other extreme is the tortured, inward “Le secret,” in which Spence charts this particular agony with a heady mixture of sotto voce and something remarkably like crooning. (The best tenors do this, despite being marked down for it.)
“En sourdine” is yearning given a voice. It is of course a measure of Spence’s pianissimo at its most enchanting, but lyricism in the order of the day in this tenor’s vocal universe. Spence the operatic singer shows up in the more impassioned songs, but at its most ardent, his voice retains its native beauty. But what linger in the mind are the phrases of quiet introspection and accord.
There is, of course, “Claire de lune” and a charming lullaby, “Les berceaux.” The most haunting song of the lot, “Dans le foret de septembre,” brings the disc to a rapt close.
A bounty of chansons
The “Ravel Year,” marking the 150th anniversary of his birth, is well underway. Malcolm Martineau’s new look at the composer’s songs augurs to be one of its highlights. Spence joins a cadre of vocal colleagues in important re-examinations of the composer’s significant output of songs.
The “Bizet Year” marking the 150th anniversary of his death, has now ventured a three-CD set of the complete songs of the composer of “Carmen.” If the anniversary accomplishes nothing else, it will be its highlighting of the treasures to be found elsewhere in this famous composer’s work.
Gabriel Fauré, La bonne chanson, Nicky Spence, tenor, Julius Drake, piano, CD and streaming, Hyperion Records. https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk
Maurice Ravel, Complete Songs, Nicky Spence, tenor, and others, Malcolm Martineau, piano, CD and streaming, Signum Records. https://www.signumrecords.com
Georges Bizet, The Songs, various artists, CD and streaming, Hyperion Records.
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