Viardot

"Meisterhafte Klavierquartette Die Komponistin Louis Héritte-Viardot (1841-1918) hat – wenn auch in der Öffentlichkeit wenig bekannt – der Musikgeschichte tiefe Spuren eingeprägt. Weit stärker als ihre berühmten Verwandten, ihre Mutter Pauline Viardot-Garcia (1821-1910) und ihre Tante Maria Malibran (1808-1836), zwei der berühmtesten Sängerinnen des 19. Jahrhunderts, hat sie sich mit großer Ausdauer und Disziplin dem Komponieren verschrieben und dabei neben Kammermusikwerken auch die männlich besetzten Domänen von Sinfonie und Oper in Angriff genommen.

This disc demonstrates that Cecilia Bartoli is as much at home in the world of the salon recital as she is in the swoops and vocal acrobatics of the Rossini coloratura repertoire. Her voice is in fine form here- -rich, resonant and full of surprising colours–but her talent for characterisation is even finer. In Pauline Viardot's "Havanaise" for example, she perfectly captures the flirtatious, almost desperate pleadings of a Spanish sailor for a French girl to accompany him on his boat –and then switches easily to the more capricious and teasing reply of the girl in French. In a number by Ravel (sung in Yiddish and Hebrew) she brings a rather elliptical exchange between a father and his young son to life with exquisite tenderness, and finds yet another voice out of her repertoire to characterise the little boy.

Paulina Viardot and Luigi Bordeses Chopin Mazurkas transcriptions attempted to bring the 19th c. style of vocal-instrumental chamber music closer to its then present-day listeners. Chopins settings to texts by Polish poets remain little known, particularly outside Poland; the transcriptions of his mazurkas for voice and piano, performed extremely rarely, have fallen almost into oblivion. Recorded using a historical Pleyel piano, these transcriptions aim to recreate the pleasurable listening atmosphere of those distant years.

All the music on this Naxos release by violinist Reto Kuppel and pianist Wolfgang Manz receives its world premiere here. Pauline Viardot (1821-1910) was known mostly as a singer and hardly at all as a composer, and the music of her son, Paul Viardot, was conservative even in his youth. This all might seem pretty obscure, but the truth of the matter is that the program has a good deal of freshness and charm. Start right in with the biggest surprise of all, the Violin Sonatina in A minor of Pauline, whom Liszt admired.

“Salon music” became a thing in 19th-century Europe, dominated by piano works, for the obvious reason that the piano was the dominant piece of furniture in the salons of those wealthy and/or privileged enough to even have such a thing as a “salon”. But the violin wasn’t far behind as an instrument of choice–after the voice, at least in part because its tone and potential for sensuality and charm, along with impressive virtuosity and emotional expression (features important to and expected by those who attended these salon gatherings) was equal to the voice, and even greater in range and–in the hands and fingers of a capable player–in its ability to dazzle with technical feats.

Pauline Viardot (1821–1910) was one of the most extraordinary women in the history of music. Daughter of the Spanish tenor Manuel García and sister of the mezzo-soprano Maria Malibran, she studied piano with Liszt and counterpoint and harmony with Reicha, made her debut, also as a mezzo, at the age of sixteen and went on to inspire composers of the stature of Berlioz, Chopin, Gounod, Meyerbeer, Saint-Saëns, Schumann and Wagner, And she was no mean composer herself, as these passionate songs demonstrate.