In 1983
Elly Ameling was 49 and had been performing for nearly thirty
years. There are some singers whose careers have continued far
longer than this (Maggie Teyte was 52 when she recorded two
of these Berlioz songs), but voices age differently. There are
still some lovely sounds here but there is also a slight unsteadiness
which increases when under pressure. It’s a rather awkward point
in a singer’s career; with so much that is still lovely, her
best friends would have been hard put to whisper in her ear
that it would be time to retire, yet those of us for whom she
was one of the best-loved Bach singers and lieder singers of
the 1960s and 1970s can only hanker after the days when all
was perfect.
All the same, I don’t know if even
then she would have been the ideal singer for “Nuits d’été”.
Of course, it’s in the nature of the cycle that any one singer
will be more suited to some songs than others (Colin Davis famously
made a recording with four voices, which is what Berlioz actually
intended). “Villanelle” would have been ideal for her, and it
still gets the cycle off to a charming start. But, if we are
to hear the work from just one singer, surely we require a singer
with the darkness of tone and the dramatic weight for the more
significant later songs, even if such a singer would be a shade
heavy for “Villanelle”. It would also help to have a more involved
contribution from the orchestra than Robert Shaw’s laid-back
professionalism provides.
Such a conducting style might seem
more at home in Fauré, and indeed, there is much attractive
shading, but the famous “Sicilienne” is very sluggish indeed.
In any case, an interpretative manner which blandly fails to
differentiate between two such different composers does no favour
to either.
All things considered, a recording
which captures a much-loved singer at a late stage of her career
in a work mostly unsuited to her, with uninspiring orchestral
support, might have been better left in the vaults. A fair enough
bargain reissue, you might say. Well, since critics don’t pay
for their records I’m not quite sure what this costs, but I
presume that for a little more than half the price of a top-price
CD you get a little more than half the length of many such,
so where is the bargain? The total timing, by the way, is nowhere
mentioned on the cover or the booklet, though the timings of
the individual pieces are, if suspicious listeners can be troubled
to add them up before purchasing.
There are notes in English, texts and
translations. For this relief much thanks.
Christopher Howell
Elly Ameling (soprano)*
