Berlioz’s songs and scenes with orchestra are more often associated with big voices, whether sopranos like Regine Crespin or mezzos like Janet Baker. But despite her lighter voice, Véronique Gens here displays the emotional range and vocal flexibility to make this disc a treasure worthy to stand alongside the best. In the oft-recorded Les nuits d’eté, the plaintive quality of her voice helps her fully capture the tragic dimensions of songs such as Le Spectre de la rose and Sur les lagunes. In the latter, as elsewhere, she marries voice, music, and text, as in the way she extends the word “toujour” in the second line of the poem, or in her singing of the descending declamation of “Ah, sans amour s’en aller sur la mer”, or the touching cry of barely suppressed pain at “Mon âme pleure …”. Such instances are endlessly repeated on this disc.
The lightness of the voice is an asset in songs such as the opening Villanelle, taken at a faster pace than usual, its spring-like quality perfectly caught, and in the wind-blown L’ile inconnue, with its folksong simplicity. Time and again Gens floats phrases whose sheer vocal beauty leaves us transfixed, and her attentiveness to textual nuances never gets in the way of the vocal line. In other words, there isn’t a single descent into the currently nasty habit of overemphasis favored by too many of today’s singers. As elsewhere on this program, the Lyon Opera Orchestra and conductor Louis Langrée provide ravishing accompaniments, especially important in Les nuits with its transparent scoring and exposed orchestral solo turns.
The other large-scale piece is La mort de Cléopâtre, the dramatic cantata Berlioz wrote for the Prix de Rome competition in 1829. Instead of composing a predictable academic work of the sort that Prix juries favored, Berlioz wrote a boldly original one that contained, in the words of one jury member, “chords from another planet” and “rhythms that no one anywhere had ever heard.” This dark, powerful work didn’t win the prize of course, and even today it’s rarely programmed–though it does make an effective concert piece as evidenced here in Gens’ performance. Once again, she overcomes what should be a deficit–her light, glowing instrument–to become a convincing tragic figure, revealing a range of color and amplitude that makes the big climaxes telling. The despair in her voice and phrasing in the hopeless passage before the concluding Meditation is shattering. At the close, as the queen dying from the viper’s bite, Gens reduces her voice to a half-whisper, pale and almost colorless, making Berlioz’s bold conclusion a moving experience.
The remainder of the disc contains three songs Berlioz reworked with orchestral accompaniment. La captive, to a Victor Hugo text, shares melodic richness with intense poetry and a dreamy quality that wouldn’t be out of place in Les nuits. The charming fairy-tale La belle voyageuse began life as part of a set of songs called Irish Melodies; Berlioz then made three further versions of it. Zaïde is a frothy example of a French composer’s fascination with Spain, a light bolero reminiscent of Eboli’s Song of the Veil from Verdi’s Don Carlo, written two decades later. It closes the disc in a bright burst of castanet-enhanced verve.
It goes without saying that all are flawlessly done. Gens, who established her reputation as a singer of Baroque music, now has recorded first-rate discs of Handel cantatas and French songs for Virgin. With this magnificent Berlioz program, she solidifies her standing as one of those relatively few singers who stirs eager anticipation for the next release.
