Après un Rêve

Songs by Richard Strauss, Gabriel Fauré, Felix Mendelssohn, Ernest Chausson, Vincent Bouchet, Francis Poulenc, Benjamin Britten
Sandrine Piau, soprano; Susan Manoff, piano
Naïve Y5250
****

After making her initial reputation as a singer of baroque music, the French soprano Sandrine Piau here turns to more modern vocal music, singing in German, French and English. She begins with three of Strauss’s best known Lieder followed by three well known Fauré songs and four by Mendelssohn. These latter are well in the German tradition. I am not usually an admirer of Poulenc’s music but the four songs included here do have some charm and a good deal of musical interest. The three songs by Benjamin Britten are arrangements of folk songs. The most unusual items in the collection are the five Galgenlieder (Gallows Songs) by the French composer and singer Vincent Bouchot (born 1966). These are set to German verses by Christian Morgenstern (1871–1914) and are reminiscent of the songs of Hugo Wolf. According to the liner notes, these songs ‘combine popular inspiration with evocative devices of deliberate simplicity, somewhere between nursery rhyme and incantation’. To an English reader, the text of the poems (in translation) might seem to make little sense but the music reveals a lively imagination. Piau’s voice, though not one of great power, is true and well projected, and her enunciation of the three languages is excellent. She receives first rate support from the American pianist Susan Manoff. – Richard Gate