Two Words, One Answer.
Sad Fate
 Northlanders #7 / "Is Bronac Mo Cineamium (Sad Is My Fate)" $5.00 "Sven The Returned" part 7 of 8: "Is Bronac Mo Cineamium (Sad Is My Fate)"  Purcell: O Solitude $16.99 Drat! Discontinued? Is it really worth writing a review then? I've had this CD on hand for months and just got a chance to listen to it carefully, and now it's available only used... ...oh well. The incomparable Gerard Lesne brings his French sophistication and expressivity to these familiar 'art' songs, written by Henry Purcell during the English Civil War chiefly for his aristocratic amateur patrons, for private and/or semi-private theater performance. All the most prominent 'early music' singers of England, female and male, have taken their best shot at this repertoire over the past 59 years, accompanied by all the finest lutenists, but few if any have achieved the technical control, the musical ease, of Lesne. It's not so much the raw beauty of Lesne's voice -- Julianne Baird or Emma Kirkby produce more sheer loveliness -- but the absolute elegance of his musical phrasing that makes his singing so compelling. But what a shame, then, that he couldn't have mastered English diction more convincingly. If I didn't know the texts of these songs fairly well, I might begrudge a star from my rating. Lesne's pronunciation of French, his first language, is flawless, and so is his Italian, so why not English? I had the same reaction to a program of English lute songs sung by Monserrat Figueras once. Oh, but wait... can I really 'hear' the text of any 17th C English songs when sung by Kirkby or Baird, or for that matter Janet Baker? English is infernally hard to sing! Lesne is acoompanied by the regular continuo players of Il Seminario Musicale: Pascal Montheilhet on theorbo, Blandine Rannou on clavecin, and Bruno Cocset on basse de violon. Cocset also leavens the program with some splendid virtuosic instrumental airs, played with his special grave delicacy on a 17th C cello. Both the songs and the instrumental airs are mostly composed on a "ground" -- that is, on a repeated bass figure such as the chaconne or passacaglia -- allowed the singer or treble instrumentalist almost the freedom of improvisation. Lesne handles that freedom with tasteful restraint; he ornaments, but he never over-ornaments. Purcell was a royalist, a partisan of the beheaded King Charles, a cavalier in all his sympathies. The rarely performed song "If Pray'rs and Tears", sung fervently on this CD, is possibly his most explicit lament for the tide of his own times. It could as well be a lament for English music; the early death of Henry Purcell and the victory of the Calvinist Roundheads combined to scuttle native English musical genius for several centuries. |
|
