Ansermet conducts FAURÉ = Pénélope – Prélude; Requiem; Pelléas et Mélisande Suite; Masques et Bergamasques – Orchestre de la Suisse Romande – Pristine Audio PASC 728 (76:38) [www.pristineclassical.com] *****:
These Fauré performances, originally recorded by Decca 16 October 1955 (Requiem) and 22-24 February 1961, return to us, courtesy of Andrew Rose and his patented XR restoration process, as part of the centenary of the composer’s death. To put the case succinctly, Ansermet’s reading provides a remarkably clear and sober treatment of this uncanny, pious score, entirely at peace with death as a natural conclusion, even extension, of life. The cleanliness of the lines, melodic and harmonic, in Fauré’s idiomatic, modal (Niedermeyer School) arsenal of musical effects, has rarely proceeded without some personal idiosyncrasies on the parts of soloists or conductors, which in this reading remain conspicuously absent. The contributions from solos Suzanne Danco and Gerard Souzay emerge clearly in solid diction and emotional inflection, stellar but without hyperbolic starlight.
I confess to having begun my audition of the entire album with the exquisite Agnus Dei from the Requiem, having long been seduced by its hypnotic, lyrically chromatic line by acolytes Jean Fournet and Carlo Maria Giulini. The clarity of enunciation of the text by male chorus members only intensifies the subjectivity of emotion here expressed, the notion of personal sacrifice that instantiates a universal phenomenon. The female voices serve to lift the moment in resigned exaltation, and the uncredited organ player consistently delivers a richly sonorous groundwork that sustains both singers and brass in this confident expression of faith. Only in the Libera me appears the notion of God’s wrath, but it emerges in the course of a plea for mercy, for forgiveness for and liberation from our natural infirmities. The throbbing organ arpeggios of the concluding In paradisum bring the treble voices to a subdued ecstasy, death as what the composer conceived as “a happy deliverance, an aspiration of happiness above.”
The disc opens with the Prélude to Faure’s 1907-1912 opera Pénélope, the faithful, enduring wife of Odysseus, whose music offers a combination of Wagner’s leitmotif technique – without individual solo arias – fused to Fauré’s essentially delicate orchestration. Dark and moody, the Prélude rises to a muted climax, low strings and horns prominent, the color borrowed perhaps from Wagner’s Parsifal.
Fauré conceived the incidental music (hastily) for Maurice Maeterlinck’s play Pelléas et Mélisande in 1898 for a London production. Impatient with his own capacity for orchestral scoring, Fauré engaged his pupil Charles Koechlin for the task. From the original 19 scenes Fauré extracted four, now (c. 1901) orchestrated by himself, adding the lovely G minor Sicilienne last – the one movement Serge Koussevitzky failed to record. La Fileuse, the spinning-wheel scene, features an uncredited oboe part attended by the OSR strings. The powerful D minor Mort de Mélisande plays as an unsentimental dirge, more noble than lugubrious. The clarinets and flutes seem to uplift the moment with a sense of bucolic mystery.
Albert I, Prince of Monaco, commissioned the incidental music – originally eight numbers – for Masques et Bargamasques in 1919. Camille Saint-Saens had suggested the commission for Monte Carlo, even putting forth poet Paul Verlaine’s Fêtes galantes as a possible source. Fauré had already set the poem to music in 1887. With a new libretto by René Fauchois, the amorous play soon imbibes aspects of the Commedia dell’arte, rife with ribald jokes and pantomime. Ansermet injects into each of the four movements a robust energy, especially the D minor Gavotte. The final movement, Pastorale, utilizes D major for its sometimes anxious mood, ending what the composer had termed a divertissement. As a “farewell to the orchestra” Fauré fashioned a disarmingly sonorous score, vibrant and infectious in the Ansermet reading.
Put this album on your Best of the Year recommendations.
—Gary Lemco
Ansermet conducts FAURÉ =
Pénélope – Prélude;
Requiem, Op. 48;
Pelléas et Mélisande – Suite, Op. 80;
Masques et Bergamasques – Suite, Op. 112
Suzanne Danco, soprano/
Gerard Souzay, baritone/
Orchestre de la Suisse Romande
