Canteloube: Songs of the Auvergne
Karina Gauvin
(soprano)
Canadian Chamber Ensemble
Raffi Armenian (conductor)
CBC Records
What an exquisite recording! If there's any justice left, Karina Gauvin's performance of Canteloube's rustic gems will start garnering award nominations before long.
Joseph Canteloube (1879–1957) — his full name was Marie-Joseph Canteloube de Malaret — studied composition with Vincent d'Indy and then spent much of his adult life collecting folk tunes from the various regions of southern France. He assembled and published a four-volume Anthologie des chants populaires français between 1939 and 1944, but he is best remembered for his thirty Chants d'Auvergne, published in five volumes between 1923 and 1955.
Canteloube's fame stems in large part from his colorful, immediately seductive orchestrations, whose unfailing beauty communicates the aural essence of a pastoral paradise. Virtually every soprano to have ventured into the orchestral song repertoire has been drawn to his Auvergne collection — and especially to the often-anthologized "Baïlèro," a tender call from shepherdess to shepherd whose gentle, repetitive melody, once heard, cannot be forgotten.
Recordings of Songs of the Auvergne began appearing before the collection was even complete, beginning with a 1930 issue featuring the songs' first champion, soprano Madeleine Grey (whose voice was better suited to the rugged verve of the livelier numbers than the rarefied beauty of the slower settings). Since that pioneering effort, a host of great singers have recorded some or all of the Songs: Victoria de los Angeles, Jill Gomez, Kiri Te Kanawa, Frederica von Stade (occasionally defeated in happier songs by the hollow sound of her lower register), Arleen Augér (who probably would have sounded ideal ten years earlier), Patricia Rozario and, most recently, Dawn Upshaw and María Bayo. Netania Davrath's 1963 recording of the entire collection for Vanguard remains prized for the incomparable folk-like simplicity of her vocalism, as well as the sonic transparency of Pierre de la Roche's orchestral accompaniment. But none of these efforts are more satisfying as a whole than soprano Karina Gauvin's partnership with the Canadian Chamber Ensemble.
Although she is not yet famous in the U.S., Gauvin has won awards in her native Canada and elsewhere for repertoire ranging from Handel to Fauré; her disc of French art song with pianist Marc-André Hamelin won both the 2000 Opus award for best vocal recording and Chamber Music America's "Recording of the Year." Her beautiful, extremely flexible voice, impeccably produced with minimal vibrato, displays no trace of self-conscious prima donna-hood.
Gauvin's versatility wins one over from the start. In the first three songs, "La Pastoura als camps," "Lou Coucut" and "Pastourelle," she effortlessly moves from the taunting "tra la la" of a teasing shepherdess to a light ditty about a cuckoo bird, and then to a fuller-voiced, haunting love song about how a young woman's beauty could move a young man to bridge a wide river. With each song her tone changes: she creates a world of difference between the energetic "Chut, chut" ("Hush, hush") and the near-sacred stillness of the ballad "Brezaïrola." Gauvin's renditions of Canteloube's plaintive "La Delaïssádo" and "Uno jionto postouro" are especially heart-tugging.
Equally wonderful are Raffi Armenian's unique
chamber-scale reductions of Canteloube's orchestrations for larger forces. The
16 members of the Canadian Chamber Ensemble play with such beauty and
transparency that there is no sense of "making do" with less-than-ideal forces;
the gorgeous accompaniment swells and flows around Gauvin's voice, enhancing her
breathtaking vocalism. Equal praise goes to recording and mastering engineer
Peter Cook, who flatters voice and instruments with an exceptionally natural
acoustic, and to acoustician Russell Johnson, the man responsible for the lush
sound in the recording venue, the Armenian Theatre in Kitchener, Ontario. All in
all, this is a magnificent achievement.
