Paris by Night - French Songs from the Belle Epoque
Hélène Delavault (mezzo-soprano)
Cyrille Lehn (piano)
This was a sort of cabaret evening, a vague evocation of the kind of music that was performed in the celebrated Montmartre nightclub "Le Chat Noir" around the turn of the 20th Century, with the odd excursion into the more polite salon world more familiar to 'serious' composers like Fauré or Debussy, the whole linked by an entertaining and informative commentary from mezzo-soprano Hélène Delavault.
For those who have forgotten that name, she is best known internationally for her lead role in Peter Brook's "La Tragédie de Carmen" back in '83, and she has always leaned rather more towards musical comedy and cabaret than the standard classical repertory. The voice is now a little unsteady in the upper register, and very plummy when she puts some weight behind the sound, and her articulation is not all it could be, which is a fairly serious flaw in this kind of repertory, where a comprehension of the text (or at least, the possibility of guessing accurately what you might have missed) is pretty well essential. However, the intelligence and the humour are unfaded, and the progression of songs and piano interludes was cleverly managed and well planned.
In many respects, the poorest elements were the "art-songs", where her voice has become too blowsy for such delicate, controlled music (Fauré and Debussy). The best, on the other hand, usually came from Yvette Guilbert's repertory. Guilbert, immortalised by Toulouse-Lautrec, was a phenomenal diseuse, a celebrated cabaret singer with little actual voice, but a unique and extremely distinctive manner of putting across her material, which was frequently extremely suggestive in content, and which she would deliver (at least in the recordings I've heard) with an irrepressible sense of glee, which, while not sounding remotely similar, Delavault also managed to capture, to give us a generally very entertaining evening.
[Next: 20th August]
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