Ravel: Songs (CD)
Nominated in the Classical Album of the Year: Vocal or Choral Performance category in Canada’s 2010 Juno Awards. The award ceremony will be on 17 April with a broadcast on CTV on 18 April.
“an elegantly crafted recital on which we are allowed to eavesdrop through a peach of a recording. Songs by Ravel from Hyperion. Superb.” BBC Radio 3 CD Review
FIVE STARS BBC Music Magazine, July 2009
Editor’s Choice, Gramophone, August 2009
Composer: Maurice Ravel
Performers:
Gerald Finley (bass-baritone)
Julius Drake (piano)
Recorded: July 2008, All Saints, East Finchley, London, UK
Release date: June 2009
Label: Hyperion CDA67728
Total duration: 71 minutes 24 seconds
ASIN: B0025YZ82Y
Track Listing
Histoires naturelles
1 No 1: Le paon ‘Il va sûrement se marier aujourd’hui’
2 No 2: Le grillon ‘C’est l’heure où, las d’errer, l’insecte nègre revient’
3 No 3: Le cygne ‘Il glisse sur le bassin, comme un traîneau blanc’
4 No 4: Le martin-pêcheur ‘Ça n’a pas mordu, ce soir, mais je rapporte une rare émotion’
5 No 5: La pintade ‘C’est la bossue de ma cour’
6 Ronsard à son âme ‘Amelette Ronsardelette’
Don Quichotte à Dulcinée
7 No 1: Chanson romanesque ‘Si vous me disiez que la terre’
8 No 2: Chanson épique ‘Bon Saint Michel qui me donnez loisir’
9 No 3: Chanson à boire ‘Foin du bâtard, illustre Dame’
10 Un grand sommeil noir
11 Les grands vents venus d’outremer
12 Sur l’herbe ‘L’abbé divague.—Et toi, marquis’
Chants populaires
13 No 2: Chanson française ‘Janeta ount anirem gardar’
14 No 3: Chanson italienne ‘M’affaccio la finestra e vedo l’onde’
15 No 4: Chanson hébraïque ‘Mejerke, main Suhn’
16 No 5: Chanson écossaise ‘Ye banks and braes o’ bonnie Doon’
17 Noël des jouets ‘Le troupeau verni des moutons’
Deux épigrammes de Clément Marot
18 No 1: D’Anne qui m’a jecta de la neige ‘Anne par jeu me jecta de la neige’
19 No 2: D’Anne jouant de l’espinette ‘Lors que je voy en ordre la brunette’
Cinq mélodies populaires grecques
20 No 1: Le réveil de la mariée ‘Réveille-toi, réveille-toi, perdrix mignonne’
21 No 2: Là-bas, vers l’église
22 No 3: Quel galant m’est comparable?
23 No 4: Chanson des cueilleuses de lentisques ‘Ô joie de mon âme’
24 No 5: Tout gai!
Deux mélodies hébraïques
25 No 1: Kaddisch ‘Yithgaddal weyithkaddash scheméh rabba’
26 No 2: L’énigme éternelle ‘Frägt die Velt die alte Casche’
Click here to hear track samples through the Hyperion website
Photo Gallery
Many thanks indeed to Sim Canetty Clarke for letting us use her wonderful photos of Julius and Gerry recording this CD
What the critics say
***** FIVE STARS ***** BBC Music Magazine, July 2009
Christopher Dingle, BBC Music Magazine, July 2009
When it comes to Ravel’s songs, there is hardly an embarrassment of riches in the catalogue. While there is an Aladdin’s cave of releases featuring his orchestral, chamber and piano works, recent discs of the melodies and chansons are as rare as blue diamonds, and often only the cases could be described as jewels. It feels inadequate, then, just to describe this enchanting new collection from Gerald Finley and Julius Drake as the best modern recital devoted to the wonderfully varied world of Ravel’s songs. It is difficult for baritones to escape names such as Gerard Souzay and Gabriel Bacquier in this repertoire but, if Finley may not always match them for breezy characterisation, his richness of tone and sureness of touch ensure that he can hold his head high in their company.
Rarely has the disturbing picture of Un grand sommeil noir been draped in such dark velvet, an inky malevolent beauty. Finley gives the melancholic affirmation of ‘Kaddisch’ its full weight of understated nobility, and is clearly having fun in the drinking song from Don Quichotte a Dulcinee. He is typically direct, yet not afraid to include a delicious slide at the mention of a fishing rod in ‘Le Martin-Pecheur’ (Histoires naturelles). Julius Drake’s warm toned playing is, as ever, a perfect foil, all captured in Hyperion’s wonderful (for CD) sound. Riches indeed.
Hugo Shirley, Musicalcriticism.com, 7 June 2009
Rating: Four out of five stars
Having already tackled Ives, Barber and Schumann for Hyperion – to great acclaim – Gerald Finley now puts his burnished baritone to the service of Ravel and his enigmatic song output. If anything, the stylistic and emotional range of Ravel’s songs brings him close to Ives, but for all their beauty and mastery, Ravel still steers largely clear of subjective engagement, even in this most personal of genres.
This is less a criticism than an observation of what makes Ravel’s songs so intriguing and lies behind their special beauty: they might, as Roger Nichols rightly says in his characteristically learned and entertaining booklet essay, ‘embrace a whole world’, but it’s an exquisite world distilled from the slightly objective essence of the French Mélodie. In the ‘art songs’ Finley is a near ideal interpreter, his beautiful voice and characteristic intelligence come together with an instinctive and totally idiomatic grasp of French to emphasise the humour and beauty of the wonderful Histoires naturelles which open the disc. ‘Le cygne’ – a distant relative of Saint-Saëns’s own highly melodic swan – is particularly fine, with Finley capturing a touching sense of wonder, repeated in ‘Le martin-pêcheur’. Finley’s accompanist, Julius Drake, is his typically sensitive and virtuosic self, too, rising to the challenges of Ravel’s ingenious descriptive effects with relish.
Finley is again suave and honey-toned in Don Quichotte à Dulcinée, but for me there could have been a little more character given to these brief evocations of Cervantes’ knight; in ‘Chanson romanesque’ he sounds almost too adeptly seductive. The rhetorical demands of ‘Chanson épique’, however, are met with thrilling vocal security, even if ‘Chanson à boire’ again misses some of the knight’s ineptness in its robust delivery.
In the four (of five) Chants populaires included in the programme, Finley is once again outstanding. He is more successful, however, in capturing the folky simplicity of ‘Chanson française’ and ‘Chanson hébraïque’ than ‘Chanson italienne’ – a little overloaded with emotion, so that simplicity is lost as it becomes more a knowing parody of Puccini – and the naïveté of final Burns setting, ‘Chanson écossaise’, is similarly missed. These criticisms, however, are to be read in the context of the whole disc, and it can be easy to take Finley’s unusually refined artistry for granted. More often than not, it resonates perfectly with Ravel’s expressive world and it seems churlish to complain of his artistry being at odds with some of the folk-songs’ artlessness. In any case, the true folky authenticity of these songs is questionable, having already been filtered through Ravel’s own refined musical processes.
This refinement is in evidence again in the rarefied historicism of the Deux épigrammes de Clément Marot, particularly with the delicate piano writing to describe the spinet in ‘D’Anne jouant de l’espinette’. This is followed by Cinqu melodies populaires grecques where Finley and Drake let their hair down in performances of humour and passion – listen in particular to Finley’s grand exclamations of ‘Quel gallant m’est comparable’, answered by the piano’s quirky acciaccaturas.
The recital closes with Deux melodies hébraïques, the grand, pious ‘Kaddisch’ followed by the anti-philosophy of ‘L’énigme éternelle’. Just these two songs traverse much of the ‘whole world’ of Ravel’s songs; emotionally and philosophically if not geographically. That Finley and Drake navigate their way through this varied and subtle and part of Ravel’s output with their usual sensitivity and skill – not to mention vocal lustre, from the baritone, and dexterity, from his pianist – is probably by now to be expected. That the the disc is of the expected high quality, however, makes it no less fine a recital or worthy addition to the artists’ joint discography. Highly recommended.
Elissa Poole, Globe and Mail, 8 June 2009
Rating: Four stars
Listeners were fractious at the beginning of the 20th century: Stravinksy’s dissonances in The Rite of Spring were barely audible over the roar of his outraged audience; Berg’s and Schoenberg’s music sparked a riot only the police could quell; and Ravel was booed for merely leaving out the mute e’s in one of his song cycles. They could hardly complain about Ravel’s music, though, for his mélodies are varied and marvellous, easy on the ear. Gerald Finley sings them with exquisite nuance, intimacy and warmth, and he is as fastidious as the composer in respecting the affect and cadence of the poetry, mute e’s and not.
Tim Ashley, The Guardian, 12 June 2009
Art songs can be among the most self-revealing works in any composer’s output, so it’s not surprising that Ravel, among the most private of men, wrote few of them. Those we do have show him to be something of a chameleon and a bit of a borrower, containing and hiding his emotions within folk-song arrangements, behind the formal ambiguities of 17th-century poetry or beneath the anthropomorphic fables of Histoires Naturelles. Gerald Finley and Julius Drake’s survey gathers all his major songs together. It’s a beautiful disc that startles in ways you don’t always expect. Though Ravel is often non-specific about the genders of his singers, much of this material has become the province of mezzos, so it might take you a while to acclimatise yourself to Finley’s dark, warm baritone in this music. Only the Kaddish from the Deux Mélodies Hébraïques sounds awkward sung by a man, however exquisitely Finley shapes it. Elsewhere, the poetic restraint of his singing and Drake’s playing is spellbinding. The settings of Marot and Ronsard are ravishingly done, and the mixture of irony and sadness they bring to Histoires Naturelles is exceptional.
Paul Gent, Telegraph, 13 June 2009
Rating: Four stars
After acclaimed recordings of Barber, Ives and Schumann, baritone Gerald Finley and pianist Julius Drake pull off another success with this disc of Ravel songs. These are for the most part works of cool restraint, with passion hidden beneath a jewelled surface, and Finley’s wonderfully flexible voice achieves maximum effect with minimal means.
He darkens his tone in Un Grand Sommeil noir , brightens it in Tout gai! , and in Ronsard à son âme he wisely allows the blank beauty of the music to do all the work. The highlight is the group Histoires naturelles , where Drake’s playing is a marvel of delicacy and almost gamelan-like sonorities.
Hugh Canning, The Sunday Times, 28 June 2009
Rating: Four out of five stars
After outstanding recitals of Charles Ives, Samuel Barber and Schumann, the Canadian baritone and his regular pianist turn their attention to Ravel, a great but still undervalued songwriter. Their selection includes three of his finest song groups — the Cinq mélodies populaires grecques (1905-06), Histoires naturelles (1907) and the late Cervantes triptych, Don Quichotte à Dulcinée. Finley is in his vocal prime (late forties) and his burnished baritone is richer and more beautiful than ever. His French, too, is excellent, even if it doesn’t have the savour of a native speaker. He captures the laid-back irony of Jules Renard’s bird and insect portraits (Histoires naturelles) to perfection: the preening, self-admiring exhibitionism of the peacock, the grotesque awkwardness and aggression of the “barnyard’s hunchback”, the guinea fowl (Drake underlines the bird’s pugilistic character with his trenchant playing) and a magical sense of wonder in his description of the angler, whose rod is mistaken for a branch by a kingfisher. If his Don Quixote sounds youthful, he nevertheless revels in the Iberian dance rhythms Ravel inherited from his Basque mother. In the Greek folk songs and a selection of four Chants populaires Finley sings with the art that conceals art — relishing but never overpointing the texts, and using a wide palette of dynamic and colour to underpin his musical insights. Other highlights are the inward-looking Ronsard à son âme, the passionate Les grands vents venus d’outremer and the lamenting Deux melodies hébraïques. A superb disc.
Editor’s choice
James Inverne, Gramophone August 2009
Evocative performances of these exquisitely crafted miniatures
Another month, another Gerald Finley recital disc, another Editor’s Choice. Par for the course for this most splendid interpreter of song. And, no doubt helped by his own bilingual Candian upbringing, he takes to Ravel’s songs as to the manner born – delving deep to find a composer playing, not only with emotions, but with the form itself. Marvellous work too from Julius Drake.
John Terauds, The Toronto Star, 13 June 2009
Expat Canadian baritone Gerald Finley continues to amaze with his expressive voice and careful artistry. On his latest disc, Songs of Ravel, Finley and pianist Julius Drake take us on a magic carpet ride far from the cares of the street and city. We get the less-well-known side of Impressionist composer Maurice Ravel, including some folk songs, the ethereal Histoires naturelles including the hypnotic stillness of “Le martin-pêcheur.” Like waves gently hitting the shore, this music soothes the savage, sunburned breast.
Steven Ritter, Audaud, July 16, 2009
An excellent disc of music that doesn’t pass this way too often.
Ravel’s songs are not mainstream; he is not one that comes to mind when thinking of songs from the French school. This disc presents us with a series of “folk” songs and his “art” songs. The former are deliciously airy and pointed while the latter revel in the best Ravelian tradition of line, meter, and texture. The chromaticism and harmonic intricacies are no different than what is found in his orchestral and other works, with the exception of an unusually enhanced melodic line that flashes with color and poetic gradation.
Usually his songs are found in spurts, acting as filler for other like-minded albums and recitals. There are comparatively few discs solely devoted to his music, so that makes this album the more welcome. Gerald Finley, whom I like a great deal but have been critical of in the past, seems to have found his métier her, singing with an enlightened sense of vocal agility and also fidelity to the textual nuances of Ravel’s music. This is one of the best Ravel recitals I have heard in a long time (and they don’t come often) so if this composer and his songs have any meaning for you at all, grab this disc quick. Julius Drake adds his normally sensitive partnership in music that is truly written for two.
Translated by Petra Habeth
Although the wonderfully ductile Baritone Gerald Finley is Anglo Canadian he is also more than qualified to sing in the French tongue. Which he – with his well-proven accompanist Julius Drake – proves in this selection of Ravel songs, in being utterly exemplarily and with formidable text understanding. These pieces, flaring between folk-idiom and art performance, are given individual treatment by one who appreciates and enjoys handling the vocals. An intellectual amusement which does justice to this elusive composer.
Andrew McGregor, BBC Radio 3 “CD Review”, 15 August 2009
[transcription]
Let’s begin with baritone Gerald Finley’s latest release, songs by Maurice Ravel, including his last three from 1932, Don Quichotte à Dulcinée. These were for a film about Cervantes’s elderly knight errant starring the great Russian bass Chaliapin, almost 60, and Ravel was warned that he shouldn’t write too many high C’s D’s or E-flats for the singer. Ravel missed his deadline and the baritone Jacques Ibert got the contract at the end, but Ravels three songs encompass the original brief, a serenade, a heroic song and a comic one. Well the last of them is that drinking song, the knight raising a glass to joy and crying a pox on anyone denying him his pleasure in drink, and before it, here’s the “epic song”, Quixote as Holy Warrior
[Music]
I drink to joy. Don Quichotte in his cups in the last of Ravel’s 3 songs, Don Quichotte à Dulcinée. That comic turn is followed by one of Ravel’s bleakest songs Un grand sommeil noir, a bitter darkness in which Gerald Finley and Julius Drake rage against the vast dark sleep that falls on life. Well, having these two songs alongside each other is a potent demonstration of the range and power of their performances, and of Ravel’s settings, added to which there’s the delicate imagery of the wildlife portrayed in the Histoires naturelles, and the elegant simplicity of the earlier folk song settings.
Good notes, all texts and translations. And an elegantly crafted recital on which we are allowed to eavesdrop through a peach of a recording. Songs by Ravel from Hyperion. Superb.
David J Baker, Opera News, December 2009
On the typical song recital menu, Ravel is garnish or seasoning, rarely a main course. His output includes some reliable standards (the brief cycles like Shéhérazade or the Hebrew folk tunes) along with more arid material that needs a performer with sophisticated diction. This is a composer celebrated for lush effects, but also one who seemed to boast of his fondness for monotony.
Bass-baritone Gerald Finley dares to tackle an all-Ravel program, and it takes only a few selections to recognize his mastery and something more — a sense of delight as he turns challenges into opportunities.
Granted, the first set, the talky Histoires Naturelles, contains the hardest kind of Ravel song for a non-native French speaker. In these five animal fables in Jules Renard’s salon-style prose, Finley can’t match Gérard Souzay in terms of understatement and the ability to make speech suggest music, but Souzay is of course to the manner born. The Canadian holds up better than any other non-French singer I’ve heard in this set and, in fact, in Ravel generally speaking.
Later, in the passionate trio of songs called Don Quichotte à Dulcinée, Finley outdoes even the natives. He has the vocal security that Souzay has to fake (in his 1951 version with orchestra), and he tosses off the wordless cadenzas in the third Quijote number with real panache, unlike either Souzay or the otherwise redoubtable José van Dam. Finley, above all, avoids the sentimentality that slightly mars the work of both those Europeans.
The key here is the Canadian’s entirely natural approach, free of affectation or overinterpretation and supported by a voice of consistent beauty, warmth and flexibility. This is no surprise, if you heard his refined yet robust work in John Adams’s Doctor Atomic, which became very much his show. But to find these gifts transposed, undiminished, to the hothouse precincts of Ravel mélodie is astonishing.
In the drab “Les grands vents venus d’outremer” or the extreme range of “Un grand sommeil noir,” the baritone fails to engage fully, but those are exercises in a single effect that offer him no human handle. Give him a melody, give him a character to bring to life — even just the one-line portraits of “Sur l’herbe” — and he produces a full-bodied serving of sung theater. Though he’s expert at localized stresses and colorings, we mostly find a more global infusion of character and emotion, organic to the voice itself. Any of the folk tunes or the beautifully contrasted two “Epigrammes de Clément Marot” show this alchemy in full force.
The programming plays to Finley’s chameleon quality and diverse language skills, with selections in Hebrew, Yiddish, Italian and other tongues, always launched with urgency and lyrical warmth. What emerges is not just a great display of vocal artistry, style, diction and characterization. Many listeners will discover a new Ravel, who writes songs of unsuspected density and appeal.