The Spin Doctor Europadisc's Weekly Column

The death on 18 June last year of the brilliant Belgian coloratura soprano Jodie Devos, at the age of just 35, robbed the operatic world of one of its brightest stars. At the time, we wrote of her ‘light, agile, brilliantly focussed voice... ideally suited to the operatic coloratura repertoire’, but the sheer range of repertoire she covered over the course of a career lasting barely a decade seems all the more astonishing in retrospect. From Rameau, Handel and Mozart, via Offenbach, Donizetti, Verdi, Thomas, Debussy and Ravel, to contemporary music and jazz standards, her voice shone with rare intensity, encompassing everything from the teasingly comic to the touchingly soulful.

Now Alpha Classics has boxed together six of the albums Devos recorded for them, including her stunning solo debut disc, ‘Offenbach Colorature’, the very different world of English and French love songs on ‘And Love Said...’, and the sparkling ‘Bijoux perdus’ of French operatic rarities. It also includes three collaborative titles: ‘Il était une fois’ (‘Once Upon a Time’) was her first Alpha appearance (2016), alongside mezzo-soprano Caroline Meng and the Quatuor Giardini piano quartet, a charming and captivating collection of fairytale-themed excerpts from French operas and operettas. The 2022 album ‘Poétiques de l’instant’ was headlined by the Quatuor Voce string quartet in music by Debussy and Yves Balmer; the chamber music programme was completed by a transcription for voice and string quartet of Debussy’s rarely-heard Proses lyriques, in which the combination of Balmer’s exquisitely sensitive arrangement and Devos’s warm, pliant voice brought new dimensions to these for underappreciated songs.

The third collaboration included in this Hommage à Jodie Devos is Pergolesi’s moving setting of the Stabat mater, composed at the end of his brief life (he died of tuberculosis at the age of just 26). In partnership with mezzo-soprano Adèle Charvet, Jodie Devos is an ideal soloist in this profoundly moving music, demonstrating her stylistic sensitivity in late Baroque music, yet not afraid to deploy her trademark quick yet carefully controlled vibrato. The Concert de la Loge under Julien Chauvin also include one of Haydn’s most expressive symphonies, no.49 ‘La Passione’, cast in the sombre key of F minor, in a vital chamber-scale performance with organ substituting for woodwind and horns.

It is for the solo albums, however, that most will want to invest in this very attractively priced and fully-documented box. ‘And Love Said...’ shows off welcome facets of Ms Devos’s voice, notably her sense of engagement with more reflective texts (her idiosyncratic English, sometimes short of consonants, actually adds to the attraction) and an enticing edginess to her timbre in the middle register. The repertoire ranges from Vaughan Williams, Bridge, Quilter, Britten and Walton to Milhaud, Leterme and Tailleferre, and concludes with a wonderfully rapt performance of Freddie Mercury’s ‘You take my breath away’. Throughout the disc, Ms Devos’s singing is matched by the finely-nuanced pianism of Nicolas Krüger.

Quite how Jodie Devos’s career might have developed had she lived longer is one of the great unanswered questions for opera lovers. Her reputation for hard work, bordering on the doggedly arduous and (at times) self-doubting, was masked by the warmth and enthusiasm of her personality, and that enthusiasm also came across in her stage presence, acting not just with her body but with every alert micro-gesture of her expressive face. Unquestionably, she was a major vocal and operatic talent whose recordings already place her among the greats of the early 21st century. It is her two albums of operetta and opera excerpts – ‘Offenbach Colorature’ and ‘Bijoux perdus’ – that are the absolute essentials. Overflowing with keenly nuanced singing, skilful word pointing, staggering technique and jaw-dropping flights into the registral stratosphere, they really get under the skin of both the onstage characters and the listener’s attention, with abundant earworms to boot! For little more than the cost of both albums separately, however, Alpha now present this very generously-filled box.

And a considerable bonus is an extra disc capturing Jodie Devos live at the 2017 jazz festival in Gaume, Belgium. The repertoire ranges from Erik Satie’s Je te veux and one of Britten’s Cabaret Songs, to hits from musicals by Bernstein, Gershwin and Rodgers, as well as favourite chansons by Kosma and Legrand. Although clearly amplified, it shows yet another side – more relaxed and unbuttoned – of this truly remarkable talent, a talent extinguished (as we’ve said before) way too soon.

The Recording:
Hommage à Jodie Devos (J Devos & various artists) ALPHA1191