Sandrine Piau: Chimere (CD + Book)

Sandrine Piau (soprano), Susan Manoff (piano)

It’s always a special pleasure to welcome an intelligently programmed and beautifully presented song recital, and this latest disc from soprano Sandrine Piau and pianist Susan Manoff ranks with the very best. Chimère concludes a series of three recitals first launched on the Naïve label with Évocations (back in 2007) and Après un Rêve (2011). Piau’s recent move to the Alpha label (which, like her, has moved from high-end early music productions to embrace a much wider repertoire) brings a substantial bonus in the form of a sumptuous CD-sized hardback book of 92 pages, gorgeously illustrated with art from the middle ages to the twentieth century.

As with the two earlier releases, Chimère explores aspects of dreams, in this case specifically their illusory nature: the ‘graveyard of our illusions’, as Piau writes so tellingly in her accompanying note. The artwork of the book ranges from 13th-century phantasmagorical beasts, via Bosch and Moreau, to Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze and Water Sprites, and the programme, though not covering quite such a huge chronological span, takes the listener from Loewe and Schumann, via Debussy, Wolf and Poulenc, to Barber and Previn.

Piau uses her soft-grained, limpid voice to bring an understated quality to Loewe’s desolate ‘Ach neige, du Schmerzenreiche’ which opens the programme, and also to a deeply-felt trio of Schumann songs (Mignon’s ‘Kennst du das Land?’, ‘Dein Angesicht’, and ‘Die Lotosblume’ from Myrthen). The programme then really hits its stride with Debussy’s first set of Fêtes galantes, mixing nostalgia and poetry in the outer numbers with the commedia dell’arte high-spirits of ‘Fantoches’, sung and played with a delightful twinkle in the eye, an enormously stylish tribute in the composer’s centenary year.

Next comes a splendid group of songs by Hugo Wolf (how often are Wolf and his almost exact contemporary Debussy set so illuminatingly side-by-side like this?). The late-Romantic hues bring out the very best in Piau and Manoff, ‘Verschwiegene Liebe’ evoking a love that dare not speak its name, while in the Mörike setting ‘Nixe Binsefuss’ all is watery lightness and transparency, with a finely-judged sense of supernatural mischief. Piau’s account of the ‘Lied vom Winde’ is a tour de force, its Wagnerian undertones delivered with an engagingly Gallic elegance.

Moving decisively into the 20th century, Gurney’s ‘Sleep’ from his Five Elizabethan Songs provides the programme with its central point of repose, sung with an admirable awareness of the music’s long line. Robert Baksa’s Dickinson setting ‘Heart! We will forget him’ is deeply touching, all the more so thanks to Piau’s idiosyncratic way with the English text. As a counterbalance to the earlier Debussy set, Poulenc’s five Apollinaire settings, Banalités, are delivered with enormous panache, forming one of the disc’s indisputable highlights, along with Barber’s enigmatic ‘Solitary Hotel’ with its tango-like inflections and James Joyce text.

Rounding off this beautifully shaped recital are André Previn’s acutely sensitive Three Dickinson Songs, the jazzy central ‘Will there really be a morning?’ exquisitely set off by the more reflective outer numbers. ‘Good Morning Midnight’, with its equivocal welcome of the nocturnal hours, seems to encapsulate the ambivalence of emotions expressed on the disc as a whole, its imagined loves and tantalising but elusive dreams. As they do throughout, Piau and Manoff show total expressive commitment and a finely-honed sensitivity to nuance.

Alpha have quickly become to go-to label for top-drawer vocal recitals, and in Sandrine Piau and Susan Manoff they have found ideal collaborators at the very height of their powers. This disc is, quite simply, a must-have for all lovers of the art of song, utterly captivating from start to finish.