Since the 1860s the French song limelight has rather been hogged by MM Faure, Duparc, Debussy and Poulenc, with Ravel’s songs banished to the shadows. Any disc of them therefore is likely to raise interest among those who love them and think them underrated. I wish I could be more enthusiastic about this one.
I won’t deny it has some good things. The instrumental playing is generally excellent, Roge can cope technically with anything Ravel throws at him and Le Roux, in the lower and middle registers of his voice, makes some agreeable sounds. But obviously nobody in the studio with a pair of ears was saying ‘No, it’s an F there, not a D’ (piano, 6th bar of ‘Chanson epique’, last crotchet) or ‘No, it’s a G flat, not an F flat’ (voice, ‘Il est doux’, five bars from the end, penultimate quaver) or ‘No, you came off the minim a quaver early’ (flute, ‘Il est doux’, bar 4, and again in bar 13), or ‘No, you’re not together, the cello came off the B a quaver early’ (‘Nahandove’, bar 13, where voice and cello are a quaver out for half a bar). These are simply ‘ouch points’ for anyone who has performed this music.
In addition there’s Le Roux’s frequent discomfort above E flat and his tendency to make the lines lumpy and overemphatic. Then there’s Roge’s taste for volume and his careless pedal releases: the final release in ‘Chanson epique’ is perhaps the most obvious, one that really goes ‘weeow’ – and at the end of one of Ravel’s finest melodies. But he also ruins one of the great pedal releases in 20th-century music at the end of ‘Aoua!’ where, after 29 bars of increasingly dissonant, sustained sound, the pedal lifts to leave the voice stranded on the middle vowel of ‘rivage’; the piano’s pause is on the second crotchet rest, not the first. Altogether this disc is a mixed bag. Does anybody care except me? Well, if the producer won’t say ‘no’, I will do it for him