Francis Poulenc - La voix humaine (Véronique Gens)

Information

Composer: Francis Poulenc

• La voix humaine, FP 171
• Sinfonietta, FP 141

Véronique Gens, soprano

Orchestre National de Lille

Alexandre Bloch, conductor

Date: 2023

Label: Alpha Classics

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Review

Véronique Gens has given us surprisingly little Poulenc on record over the years, though she included Banalités and Les chemins de l’amour on her ‘Nuit d’étoiles’ album (Erato, 5/00), and was also a hauntingly vulnerable Mme Lidoine in the DVD of the Olivier Py/Jérémie Rhorer Carmélites from Paris in 2013 (Warner, 3/15). With Alexandre Bloch and his Lille orchestra, however, she has now added La voix humaine to this small if distinguished discography, and there is little question that it ranks among her finest achievements.

Poulenc’s depiction of an unnamed woman’s desperate final phone conversation with the unheard lover who is leaving her embraces a shifting balance of sympathies and admits of multiple approaches. At one point Elle (‘She’, as Cocteau’s text calls her) admits to lying, which leaves us wondering just how much she says throughout is actually true. Does it matter if not? Text and score supply no easy answers, though Poulenc offsets doubt with the wrenching sense of desire, nostalgia and loss that permeates the score and provides the devastating emotional truth behind the verbal evasions and ambiguities.

Gens and Bloch take us through this complex terrain in ways that combine directness with admirable restraint. Poulenc called the opera a tragédie lyrique, and Gens’s negotiation of a vocal line that moves continuously between fragmentary recitative and lyrical arioso, tacitly peering back towards the methodology of Lully and Rameau, is seamless. Every word is fraught with meaning, every emotional shift unsparingly treated without once tipping towards exaggeration. It’s all unflinchingly there, from Elle’s pained initial assumption of a light-hearted tone in an attempt to convince him (and perhaps herself) that she is coping when she is not, to the utter misery of her eventual admission of attempted suicide. The anguish arbitrarily caused by crossed lines and interfering operators really makes you flinch, and the desperation she feels when he angrily hangs up on her at one point is simply heartbreaking.

Bloch, meanwhile, is with her every step of the way, traversing a faultless arc of barely contained emotion, in which everything is immaculately calibrated. This is no mean feat, given that plunges into silence are an integral part of the impact, and he sometimes ratchets up the tension by holding on to those pauses fractionally longer than Georges Prêtre in his famous EMI recording with Denise Duval, for whom the work was written (Warner, 8/63). Elsewhere he really captures the orchestral sensuality in which Poulenc insisted the score should be bathed, and the Lille orchestra’s playing is consistently superb, their warmth of tone very different from the cooler translucence of Prêtre’s Opéra-Comique forces. The recording is scrupulously and beautifully balanced, too, if more straightforward than Prêtre’s, whose engineers have Duval moving back and forth across the stereo spectrum as if pacing a room, and adds the sound effect of the phone’s receiver being picked up and put down. Bloch simply places the focus on a central voice and lets the performance do the work.

The coupling is the Sinfonietta, written for what was then the BBC’s Third Programme in 1948. Gazing back lovingly to the now lost world of Les biches, it’s in some ways just as much a work about nostalgia as the opera, and Bloch and his orchestra capture its bittersweet mood to perfection. My only cavil here, in fact, concerns the accompanying booklet, where there are no translations and the printed French text differs in places from what is being sung. Otherwise, this is an outstanding recording, and very highly recommended.

-- Tim Ashley

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Francis Poulenc (7 January 1899 – 30 January 1963) was a French composer and pianist. He was one of a group of young composers known collectively as Les Six. His compositions include songs, solo piano works, chamber music, choral pieces, operas, ballets, and orchestral concert music. Among the best-known are the ballet Les biches (1923), the Concert champêtre (1928), and the Organ Concerto (1938). In addition to his work as a composer, Poulenc was an accomplished pianist. He toured in Europe and America with the baritone Pierre Bernac and the soprano Denise Duval, and made a number of recordings.

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Véronique Gens (born 19 April 1966) is a French operatic soprano. Born in Orléans, she studied at the Conservatoire de Paris and had her debut in 1986 with William Christie and his Les Arts Florissants. While she started out as a Baroque specialist, Gens has also come into demand for roles in Mozart operas, and as an interpreter of songs by Berlioz, Debussy, Fauré and others. Her numerous recordings (more than 90 CDs and DVDs) include many works by Mozart and Purcell, as well as Joseph Canteloube's Chants d'Auvergne and Berlioz's Nuits d'été, and have received several international awards.

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