The late Gérard
Souzay (1918-2004) re-recorded his repertoire
in the 1960s and 1970s and resolutely
refused permission for Decca to reissue
his early discs. No one has been able
to understand why. It would be quite
impossible, really, to imagine more
heavenly beautiful singing of this repertoire,
the tone even, golden and natural, ascending
for instance to a meltingly lovely head
voice at the end of "Clair de Lune".
It would be impossible to imagine a
more intimate relationship between singer,
music and words, as in "Green"
(the second of the "Five Verlaine
Songs"), where the non-native speaker
usually wrestles in vain to fit all
those words into the music with a semblance
of naturalness. Limited as my own French
is, Souzay really seems to be speaking
to me here. Nor does he lack power when
called for. He is also cunning in his
differentiation of the various composers.
He opens up vistas of infinite regret
in Duparc and Chausson (apart from the
feather-light "Les Papillons"),
he becomes biting and tangy in Ravel,
delicately chaste in early Fauré.
And yet when he comes to this composer’s
enigmatic final masterpiece, "L’horizon
chimérique", of which this
was already his second recording, he
is surprisingly robust (except, of course,
in the sublime "Diane, Selénè").
The aging, deaf composer is made to
leave the stage with a bang, not a whimper.
And yet – I say this
more as a talking-point than a criticism
– later interpreters have found other
dimensions in some of these songs. Those
interpretations of "Le Temps de
lilas" which positively ooze with
decadent sensuality, for instance, hardly
run against the ethos of either Chausson
or his times. It has also been shown
that the divergence between Verlaine’s
post-coital musings in "C’est l’extase"
and the nice afternoon in the country
which Fauré apparently depicts
need not be as total as it is here.
Possibly Souzay himself belonged among
these later interpreters, hence his
objection to these youthful efforts,
but if so I think he was being unduly
self-protective and might have left
discerning listeners to make up their
own minds. At the very least, we have
here a perfect example of classic French
singing as handed down to him by Pierre
Bernac and Claire Croiza.
As I said at the beginning,
Souzay refused to allow Decca to reissue
these recordings. The original masters
obviously remain the property of Decca,
but once the recordings were more than
fifty years old there was nothing Souzay
could do to stop anybody with a decent
copy of the LPs from making a CD transfer
and selling it. A few years ago Testament
issued five highly-praised CDs which
covered virtually the whole of Souzay’s
work for Decca. There is, for that matter,
nothing that Souzay or his heirs can
do to stop anybody who has a well-worn,
scratched copy of the LPs from bunging
them on the turntable and into the computer
and pocketing an easy buck. I fear that
the present selection of as much of
Souzay’s French repertoire as will go
onto one CD is not much better than
that. The songs with piano are reasonable.
Surface hiss is high and there is the
odd scratch ("Clair de lune"
must have been somebody’s favourite)
but if filtering it out meant removing
the bloom on the voice, then better
so. There is also a degree of rattling
distortion in fortes which puts me in
mind of an LP being played with a well-worn
stylus of inadequately adjusted weight.
The trouble is that after repeated playings
like this the grooves themselves get
damaged and the record will always sound
that way, which is what seems to have
happened here. I don’t want to suggest
it’s really bad, I’ll readily put up
with much worse with live, off-the-air
stuff, but I don’t believe a Decca studio
recording, even of fifty years ago,
needed to sound like this. In the case
of the orchestral songs, however, the
distortion is quite awful. I wondered
if my own equipment was cracking up,
but it sounds just the same on other
players and to my ears it’s groove distortion
not microphone distortion. This might
just be tolerable for other singers
wishing to study the interpretations,
but for pleasurable listening it’s useless.
Unfortunately I haven’t heard the Testament
issues, but an apparently well-researched
review of them (not on this site) particularly
commends the "Don Quichotte"
performance – Souzay made no other recording
of the orchestral version – without
any warning about the technical quality,
a warning which the critic would surely
have given if it sounded like this.
Conversely, if the records really are
intractable, the sort of technical note
that Mark Obert-Thorn would certainly
have provided for a Naxos issue, frankly
describing the problems, would have
set our minds at rest.
But I’m afraid the
general presentation here is surprisingly
slipshod for a company that has given
us some valuable issues. Recording information
is limited to the year of the recording;
if you want to know the opus numbers
of the Chausson and the Fauré
you’ll have to look them up; we are
not told the arranger of the orchestrations
of the Debussy songs (not the composer
himself); the cover informs us that
the disc includes "song settings
by Chausson, Fauré, Duparc, Ravel
and traditional", which latter
seems a funny sort of description of
Debussy; for the use of capital letters
in the titles Regis have invented an
intriguing compromise of their own between
French and English rules; the orchestral
songs are allegedly conducted by a mysterious
Edouard Lindberg. Presumably this was
Edouard Lindenberg, a Romanian conductor
active in Paris in those years and highly
regarded at the time. Testament certainly
seem to think it was. The note by James
Murray is good, but Regis are warned
that a few issues of this kind will
undermine collectors’ confidence in
their work generally.
Christopher Howell
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Gérard Souzay (baritone) with Jacqueline
Bonneau (piano) except items marked* which are
with the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra/Edouard
Lindberg [Lindenberg?] 
