French concert programme — Ravel, Caplet, Roussel & others

Maurice Ravel (1875–1937)

Le paon (1906)

André Caplet (1878–1925)

Le corbeau et le renard (1919)

Albert Roussel (1869–1937)

Réponse d’une épouse sage Op.35 No.2 (1927)

Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992)

La fiancée perdue (1930)

Claude Debussy (1862–1918)

Colloque sentimental (1904)

Alongside Ravel’s cricket in Histoires naturelles there are a swan, a kingfisher, a guinea-fowl and a peacock. The major musical interest in these settings of Renard’s prose poems – which caused such outrage because, as though writing for the music hall or the café concert, the composer refused to sound the mute ‘e’ so treasured by French prosodists – is not so much the strictly functional vocal line as the extravagantly witty, brilliantly colourful and discreetly affectionate piano part. In Le Paon, strutting about in his best clothes as though it were his wedding day, the peacock is accompanied in his progress by the stately dotted rhythms of the Baroque French overture. His “diabolical cry” of “Léon! Léon!” is heralded by a crescendo of discords and his ceremonial display of his tail feathers signalled by a dramatic glissando in both hands. Considering that French composers have long delighted in writing songs with animal or bird subjects, it is surprisng that there are so few successful settings of fables by La Fontaine. Among the best are Caplet’s Trois Fables de Jean de La Fontaine, particularly Le corbeau et le renard, which offers the singer a rare opportunity for a virtuoso display of histrionics and the pianist an abundance of precisely timed illustrative detail.

Among Roussel’s forty or so mélodies are three sets of Deux Poèmes chinois which - written in 1908, 1927 and 1932 respectively - are precious tokens of the composer’s long-term interest in the culture of the Far East. Perhaps the most inspired of them, or even of all Roussel’s songs, is Réponse d’une épouse sage from the 1927 set, which is a concise but illuminatingly truthful character study. The discreet exoticism allied to the formality of the first few lines suggests an erotic vulnerability which, after the severe scolding of the middle section, is most touchingly confirmed when the opening is recalled with a shift of emotional emphasis at the end.

The last mélodies in this group – both of them love songs but neither in the conventional sense – return to human relationships. The Messiaen item is one of two settings of his own words written to frame the one song he composed to a text by someone else, Le sourire by his mother Cécile Sauvage, who had died three years earlier. So the inspiration of La fiancée perdue, which follows Le sourire in Trois Mélodies, is his mother, whose beauty he remembers in such glowing terms. Although it is one of Messiaen’s earliest published works, its authorship is unmistakable in the refulgent piano harmonies of the first part of the song and the fervently sustained line of the prayer for blessing in the second part.

The last song, Colloque sentimental, is clearly intended not as a reflection on Debussy’s relationship with Emma Bardac but as an expression of disillusionment with passed relationships. It is an unhappy ending but, as Debussy indicates by echoing the song of the nightingale from En Sourdine, it was there from the beginning.