A musical evening in Paris in the early 1800s could be a cosmopolitan affair. This programme of rarities pairs the music of two composers who were regular visitors to the city, the Italian Cherubini and the German Meyerbeer. With an attractive selection of solos and ensembles, it aims to recreate a convivial soiree of the time, even if the salon here sounds huge and rather empty (the recording was made in the reverberant church of Saint-Jean in Paris, which echoes unhelpfully).
Period instruments, especially the 1837 Erard piano, set the tone. The main appeal of the disc, however, is the variety of the material. The classically-minded Cherubini may always stay true to his native Italian style, but Meyerbeer’s songs manage to embrace influences as diverse as the Schubertian Lied and the bel canto aria of Bellini, even sometimes both at once. The best singer here is Gilles Ragon, who makes a nice job of Meyerbeer’s Hirtenlied. To the tune of his pipes, here a clarinet obbligato, a shepherd sings of his peace and contentment, finding time both for some unaccompanied musing and an exhibitionist high C. The most celebrated item is Le poete mourant, also by Meyerbeer, another wide-ranging piece that is as near to being an operatic scena as it is a song. Glenn Chambers sings it touchingly, though a firmer core to the tone at the climax would have been welcome.
Unfortunately the rest is very mixed. One of the sopranos, Jill Feldman, brings a rather squeezed, ‘period’ tone to Cherubini’s Ave Maria; the other, Tosi Poleri, tries her hand at some coloratura flights of fancy and proves to be distressingly approximate. One wonders how the reliable mezzo, Xenia Meijer, ever managed to keep in tune during their duets together. There are not a few moments here that would have had that Parisian salon audience wriggling in their seats.
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