A few years ago I had for review a disc with the British-born
baritone Konrad Jarnot, singing Duparc and Ravel. In the latter
case it was the first ever recording of the song-cycle Sheherazade
sung by a baritone and with piano accompaniment. On the
present disc we meet another highly accomplished baritone,
Canadian Jean-François Lapointe, in similar repertoire. The
choice of Duparc songs is roughly the same – there isn’t much
to choose between them. Instead of Ravel he sings Chausson’s
cycle Poème de l’amour et de la mer, which is also normally
sung by female singers and with orchestra.
To start with
the Chausson it is a composition he worked on for about a
decade and its lush and atmospheric orchestration is really
exquisite, foreboding Debussy. I had some doubt as to how
much it loses when being performed with piano only, and naturally
one forsakes a lot of colour. With a less sensitive pianist
this would be damaging indeed but Louise-Andrée Baril plays
the piano part with such a superb sense for nuance and shading
that one almost forgets that an orchestra ever entered the
reckoning. Even the interlude, for orchestra only, is so marvellously
played that it could be conceived for piano in the first place.
And the first performance of the work, in Brussels about two
months before its official premiere in Paris, was in the piano
version with the composer at the piano and the tenor Désiré
Demest in the solo part.
Hearing Jean-François
Lapointe one initially believes he too is a tenor; at least
he has all the hallmarks of a baryton-martin: light, flexible,
smooth as silk and with a beautiful half-voice. His phrasing
is constantly musical and he manages to make the ebb and flow
of the music come alive. What he also possesses is a top register
which at forte makes me believe that he might have a future
as a Heldentenor. It is that bright penetrating sound of a
good Siegmund and this gives an edge to his readings that
creates a kind of Wagnerian feeling. Not a bad feeling, actually,
since Chausson was deeply influenced by Wagner. He saw the
complete Ring in Munich in 1879, at the age of 24. He saw
Tristan the next year and attended the premiere of
Parsifal in Bayreuth in 1882. So it was, at least initially,
Wagner’s ghost that hovered over him while he worked on his
song-cycle and no doubt Tristan’s ‘eternal melody’
is part of the song-line, built as much on linguistic principles
as on musical.
To be sure, the
impact of Lapointe’s penetrating ‘Spitzentöne’ may
at times be too intense, too dramatic – the score is, after
all, rather perfumed – but Carol Farley, a great Lulu and
Salome, is also dramatically triggered on a probably long
deleted ASV disc. But listen to the third stanza of the first
song: Et mon Coeur s’est levé par ce matin d’été…,
how enticingly soft and beautiful is his delivery – and he
means what he sings! I won’t scrap my orchestral recordings
of the cycle but I will surely return to this version too.
He is also superbly
lyrical and sweet in the two songs from Chausson’s first cycle
of melodies, composed in 1882 just before he set to work on
Poéme de l’amour.
Combining Chausson
with the songs of the somewhat older Henri Duparc seems sensible,
since they were close friends and Poéme de l’amour …
was dedicated to Duparc. Contrary to Chausson, Duparc was
granted a long life – he died in 1933 at the age of 85 – but
then he had been silent as a composer for almost fifty years.
He was highly self-critical and was struck by illness and
what he left as his musical oeuvre was 17 songs composed between
1868 and 1884. He did return to some of them, revised and
even orchestrated some of them, but that’s all. Still this
seemingly meagre output has always been regarded as the essence
of French melodies and in the canon of writers of art-songs
he is mentioned by the side of the great names. But while
Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Fauré and Debussy have reached
a wide audience and become ‘popular’, Duparc’s songs have
remained the field of the connoisseur. And it is true that
they take some repeated listening to yield up. His melodic
invention is exquisite but it is so closely linked to the
words that one needs to close-read the poems to fully appreciate
it. You rarely hear someone humming a Duparc melody, but especially
his earliest songs could well stand a chance to secure permanent
places in recital programmes. Soupir and Sérénade,
both from 1869 and from his earliest published group of songs,
are certainly accessible, so is Élégie and the Baudelaire
setting L’invitation au voyage, which, together with
Phidylé and Chanson triste are the songs most
frequently encountered in recital and on record. Most of the
songs are soft and inward and Lapointe and Baril lavish just
as much beauty and sensitivity here as they did on Chausson.
I praised Konrad Jarnot three years ago (review)
and I don’t withdraw an iota of that, but readers with a sympathy
for French mélodies should give the present disc a chance
too – but be prepared for a Wagnerian hero on top of the smooth
baryton-martin.
Göran Forsling
Jean-François
Lapointe (baritone); Louise-Andrée Baril (piano) 
