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Phillip T Young Recital Hall
February 2, 2007
"I believe that I have demonstrated that there is neither rhythm nor melody in French music...that French singing is endless squawking, unbearable to the unbiased ear...And so I deduce that the French have no music and cannot have any music - and if they ever have, more's the pity for them."
Surprisingly, the words are those of a Frenchman - the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in 1753; they were echoed scarcely a generation later by one Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: "If only the accursed French language were not so villainous with musiqué! - It is a misery - even German is divine beside it. - And when it comes to the singers and songstresses - they ought never to be called that - for they do not sing, but shriek, howl, and that full-throatedly, through nose and gullet."
However accurate Rousseau and Mozart may have been during the 18th century, over the years things must have improved, for it is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine the composers of Friday evening's opening group of French songs (Duparc, Fauré and Emile Paladilhe) writing such delightful music for singers only capable of shrieking and howling.
All five songs were, in their very different ways, inimitably French; all five were given marvellously performances by Benjamin Butterfield and Bruce Vogt.
Although the printed programme was unburdened by either texts or translations of the songs, I suspect few in the audience - even without Butterfield's commendably audible spoken introductions - missed them, so expressive was his singing, to which Vogt's piano was the perfect foil.
Heaven knows, I am no great fan of the solo voice, but I know quality when I hear it.
Francis Poulenc was one of the composers who, in the 1920s, were dubbed Les Six. His reputation - as with his fellow members - is probably higher now than during his working life, when his music was considered witty and well-constructed but essentially lacking in depth: "when he has nothing to say", musicologist David Brew wrote, "he says it." (Surely one of the most politely damning remarks in the history of music criticism, although Brew can hardly have imagined that a mere two decades later, John Cage would be proudly proclaiming - in his Lecture on Nothing - "I have nothing to say and I am saying it.")
The Sextet for Piano and Winds was composed between 1930 and '32 and extensively revised in 1939. It is a spiky, at times acerbic work, with contrasting moods, occasionally pungent harmonies and a certain impudent, Gallic charm.
Friday night's performance certainly held the attention, from the opening flourish to the chorale-like closing passage. It was, though, was marred somewhat by the balance between the instruments, which was variable, to say the least - although I gather that the musicians had a scant half hour to rehearse in the hall itself, which can hardly have helped.
Despite this, and the resultant lack of clarity in Poulenc's sometimes dense textures, there was plenty in the performance to enjoy and even, as in the peremptory gesture which opens the finale, to chuckle at.
According to Charles Gounod, "Bach is a colossus of Rhodes, beneath whom all musicians pass and will continue to pass. Mozart is the most beautiful, Rossini the most brilliant, but Bach is the most comprehensive, he has said all there is to say."
I imagine that few would claim that Bach's Brandenburg Concertos are among his most profound utterances, yet even in these perhaps occasional, most definitely delightful, works Bach effectively produced an encyclopedic treatise on the art and the possibilities of the baroque concerto - both the ripieno concerto (numbers one, three and six) and the concerto grosso (two, four and five).
Friday's concert closed with a wonderful performance of the fifth concerto, as fine as I've heard. Although tempos were far from the sometimes rushed ones we have become used to of late, there was no lack of rhythmic vitality and the interplay between violinist Ann Elliott-Goldschmid (playing with a baroque bow, I believe), flutist Lanny Pollet and harpsichordist Colin Tilney - and with the ripieno group - was simply delicious.
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