Of all this year’s significant musical anniversaries, it’s the centenary of the death of Gabriel Fauré that most obviously offers scope for a Wigmore Hall tribute. Either Fauré’s piano works or his chamber music could have served as the starting points for such an event, and there will be a weekend devoted to the chamber works later in the autumn. But it was the mélodies that featured in this opening gala, 48 of them, almost half of Fauré’s entire song output.
Soprano Véronique Gens, mezzo Fleur Barron, tenor Laurence Kilsby and baritone Stéphane Degout were the soloists for this special occasion, with pianistic responsibilities shared between Susan Manoff and Julius Drake. They presented the songs in more or less chronological order, beginning with Fauré’s first setting, of Victor Hugo’s Le Papillon et la Fleur, which dates from 1861, when he was 16 and beginning to study with Saint-Saëns, and ending with his last song cycle, L’Horizon Chimérique, composed in 1921. Degout had those four songs to himself, wrapping his honeyed tone around every phrase, but elsewhere the sequence was shared out more democratically, so that all four singers contributed to a performance of Fauré’s best known cycle, La Bonne Chanson, on poems by Paul Verlaine.
It was a selection with few duds, and even fewer numbers failed to come alive in these generally first-rate performances. Perhaps the diction and clarity of the two francophones here, Gens and Degout, sometimes put their English-speaking colleagues in the shade, but both Barron and Kilsby, who seemed to start rather stiffly, became more relaxed as the evening went on and ultimately gave good accounts of themselves. Yet the lingering highlights came from Gens and Degout, he wonderfully subtle in some of Fauré’s best-known songs, Après un Rêve and Mandoline, she exquisitely sensitive in La Lune Blanche Luit Dans les Bois from La Bonne Chanson, and especially in the later more elusive songs, such as Paradis from the cycle La Chanson d’Eve. The two joined forces for the duet Puisqu’ici-bas, and then all four singers came together to double up on another duet, Pleurs d’Or, in which Drake and Manoff shared the piano part, too. It was a beautifully conceived, finely executed centenary tribute.
