Historical

Decca was on the ball in the Fifties – the same virtues adorn the Belgian soprano SUZANNE DANCO’s records. A fine Mélisande, she is completely at home with Debussy’s Villon and Bilitis; miraculously, she finds nine different shades of rapture for Fauré’s La bonne chanson.

The Wigmore Hall recently celebrated Cuénod’s 101st birthday. And Britain also gave honour, if slowly, to our own prophetess of French song, soprano MAGGIE TEYTE (born Tate, in Wolverhampton).

Haven’t quite cracked French song yet? Here are the voices that did it for me and, I guarantee, will do it for you. No, stronger than that: this is a treasure trove and, if you’re at all susceptible to the ancient art of marrying poetry to music, it will charm, disarm, delight, ravish, transport and move you deeply. Remarkably, only one of these singers was French-born.

Casals and Beecham dominate the present batch. Music & Arts has released a 13-CD set devoted to the CASALS FESTIVAL AT PRADES.

Some of these performances will be familiar from previous Sony/CBS compilations but others – the Arthur Grumiaux-William Kapell Beethoven D major Sonata, Op. 12/1; the Mozart E flat Piano Quartet (erroneously described as a Piano Trio) in which they are joined by Milton Thomas and Paul Tortelier; Mieczyslaw Horszowski playing some Bach preludes and fugues – will be discoveries for many music lovers. 

Take the two lovers of an 18th-century Spanish señora, conceal them in a clock cabinet, set the whole comical fiasco to music of unprecedented delicacy; then record it under the auspices of the composer with a characterful line-up of performers, and you have the basis of a truly historic recording – funny, eloquent and atmospheric. The composer is of course Ravel, the work, his one-act opera L’heure espagnole and the conductor is Georges Truc.

The playing has immense character and most of the remaining programme follows suit. It’s much the sort of thing you’d have expected from Leopold Stokowski, except that even he could occasionally turn the tables and dish up food without dressing – as indeed he does for much of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, the Scherzo especially.

Pearl’s well-transferred anthology highlights two major aspects of Pablo Casals’s musicianship (a third, as composer, is displayed in other collections), where heart-rending morceaux sit comfortably next to characterful orchestral performances with the LSO. That was in 1928-30, some twenty years before the formation of the Hollywood String Quartet and a recording of Walton’s Quartet that moved the composer himself to write: ‘I hope no one ever records my Quartet again, because you captured so exactly what I wanted...’