Rating: 4/5
Verdict: "French soprano revisits childhood days and dreams in exquisite song"
Sandrine Piau is hardly a singer who tosses together a motley collection of assorted arias and songs to placate her record label.
The French soprano's new CD, Apres Un Reve, explores the realm of childhood and the various dreamworlds and fantasies that it nourishes.
Twenty-five songs by Richard Strauss, Faure, Mendelssohn, Chausson, Bouchot, Poulenc and Britten release all the witches and fairies out of the wardrobe one could wish for, as well as touching on more intangible, metaphysical issues.
Would one expect less when the CD booklet poses questions like, "What do we dare to live when the illusion of our immortality vanishes?" And then, a few lines later, Piau concludes that we are all like acrobats, teetering on the wire of life between the urge to fly and the tragedy of falling.
This singer has just the right sense of malicious mischief when Mendelssohn dallies with the dark side of A Midsummer Night's Dream in his whirring Witches' Song.
Four years ago, Piau revelled in Schoenberg, Zemlinsky and Richard Strauss on her CD Evocation; now she offers three Strauss lieder with a decidedly lean cream content. Morgen!, buoyant over Susan Manoff's perfectly poised accompaniment, infers perhaps a new day may not be quite as much of a release as expected.
Vincent Bouchot is a contemporary French composer whose settings of Christian Morgenstern's Gallows Songs are spiky surrealist barbs. Piau spins the sorry tale of a vegetarian pike as if a tipple of Pierrot Lunaire had been poured over a Montmartre cabaret song.
Three songs by the Frenchman Ernest Chausson, beautifully rendered, are inevitably upstaged by a bracket of Poulenc. The younger composer's vision of a clattering, breakneck Hyde Park is dashed out line by line, while his Fetes galantes - nothing to do with Debussy's Verlaine sets - could easily slip into a French production of Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George.
There are the gentlest regrets in the final garland of Britten folksong arrangements, although the essentially unaccompanied I wonder as I wander lacks the unaffected directness that Cathy Berberian brought to it in Luciano Berio's Folksongs.
