Le Voyage Debussy: Trois chansons de Bilitis; Koechlin: Shéhérazade – excerpts; Ravel: Shéhérazade; Cinq mélodies populaires grecques; Vocalise-étude en forme de habanera etc; plus songs by Bizet and Viardot Alexandra Lowe (soprano), Patrick Milne (piano) Champs Hill CHRCD 169 58:56 mins
Anglophone singers usually have more trouble with French than with German or Italian, both with the intermediate vowels and, no less, with the rhythms. So full marks to Alexandra Lowe for her command of both, especially in the settings by Debussy and Koechlin of Pierre Louÿs’s prose poems Chansons de Bilitis. If everything on the album was of this standard, with Patrick Milne a sensitive accompanist, it would undoubtedly be worth five stars. He can be forgiven for struggling with the opening keyboard texture of ‘Asie’ in Ravel’s Shéhérazade, which is as nearly unplayable as makes no matter. But another plus is Lowes’s acceptance of marked slides in the third song of the work. For a long time now, slides have had a bad press as being sloppy and vulgar, but in pre-war recordings of the French repertoire they’re standard fare.
Elsewhere here, however, there’s an annoying lack of respect for the musical text. It’s surely illogical to claim ‘a particular affinity’ with this repertoire, and then ignore its detail. My Beckmesserish scratchings come to 15, and these refer only to the major infractions. Two of them must suffice here, from Bizet’s Ouvre ton Coeur where, in verse two, an abrupt transition from ff to pp is ignored, while Lowe fails to join the piano in the final bars, as marked. Her tone in the low and middle registers is warm and expressive, and only in the higher reaches would I ideally have liked a slightly less evident vibrato.
Roger Nichols