Irma Kolassi is barely known today but collectors who have treasured her early-1950s Decca LPs of French mélodie know her as one of the great exponents of that rarified art. She was born in Greece in 1918, lived in France with her family until the age of eight, and attended French schools in Athens. Trained as a pianist, she was a “musician’s singer”, an often pejorative term pinned on singers whose strength is attention to musical values as opposed to reliance on vocal beauty. But her voice was uniquely suited to French song, and that repertoire is where such fame as she had was won. What we hear on this long-awaited Testament reissue of her Decca recordings is a mezzo-soprano in total command of the elusive idiom, among the last of the great female interpreters of French mélodie. As Poulenc wrote to a friend after hearing her for the first time, “Who is this lady, Irma Kolassi? I am about to fall in love. Are we at last to have a chanteuse?”
The program opens with Fauré’s cycle, La Chanson d’Ève. From the very first song, “Paradis”, Kolassi sings with an intimacy that draws you into a world dewy with newness. The voice is suffused with awe at the awakening of Eve, and invests the phrase “the silence of a blue dream” with an otherworldly, floating quality. When Kolassi sings “limpid air of paradise”, the voice is limpidity itself, and throughout the cycle her every vocal gesture illuminates the text; it’s all in the colors of her voice, phrases flowing seamlessly. Time and again, we are transfixed by the singer’s inwardness, and it’s that special ability to enter into the core of each song that makes this recital so irresistible. Added to virtues such as her special timbre and impeccable diction is her command of legato and pianissimo, as we can hear in the cycle’s final song, “O Mort, poussiere d’étoiles”, where she spins out the last line of the poem in a ghostly voice that slowly fades into the final phrase “the breath of the dead”.
Despite an inherent tinge of sadness in her voice, Kolassi also excels in Fauré’s perky “Mandolin”, and after the limited dynamic frame of the Fauré cycle she almost startles with the power displayed in the second of Ravel’s Cinq melodies populaires grecques, “La-bas, vers l’église”. She also can capture the infectious gaiety of Ravel’s “Tout gai!” and the spirit of a scolding village lover in the Greek folk-song, “Dourou-Dourou”. The Ravel cycle and the pair of arranged folk-songs are all sung in Greek. In Milhaud’s Poèmes juifs, text and music bond again through Kolassi’s use of vocal color, inflection, and mastery of the ebb and flow of the musical line. A pair of songs by Louis Aubert closes this generous 75-minute master lesson in the art of French mélodie. Her accompanists are on her level too, playing with nuanced sensitivity and the transparency these songs require.
Aside from a few transitory moments indicating tape wear, the monophonic sound satisfies–the voice is clear and present. This release can be recommended wholeheartedly, all the more so since Testament thoughtfully includes full texts and translations, a felicitous touch rarely found on historical CDs.
