Veronique Vienen

1826. The Chopin family lives in Warsaw. Frederic is still a young man, just on the edge of adulthood. His catalog is already rich with some piano pieces, rondos, variations, waltzes, mazurkas and polonaises. Living in a certain material comfort and having taken refuge in relative solitude – he who desired so much to drop out of school – Chopin studies counterpoint - only counterpoint because he already masters piano technique to perfection - with Józef Elsner (1769-1854), at the Higher School of Music. He also registers at the University of Warsaw, as an auditor, to history and literature classes. The two subject matters are tinted by the two major influences of their time, Enlightenment on the one hand and Sturm und Drang on the other. Both nourish the new Polish literature that in turn, with revolutionary energy, feeds into proud nationalism.

“Suave and sparkling music, sprinkled with dream”. This is how, with this beautiful sentence, a music festival had defined our recital. Those words fully suit the idea we had while we were imagining our program, both entertaining and rich in music, emotions and delights. Véronique Poltz has put together some arrangements in harmony with this rare duo.

In this recital, Véronique Gens and Hervé Niquet bring back to life a neglected aspect of France’s Romantic heritage: songs with orchestral accompaniment. Aside from a few pieces by Debussy and Duparc, and Berlioz’s famous Nuits d’été, orchestral mélodies form a virtually forgotten continent. In collaboration with the specialists of the Palazzetto Bru Zane, Alpha Classics now revisits these musical landscapes, taking us from Brittany (Hahn) to Persia, whose beauties Fauré and Saint-Saëns exalt in very different ways. Mélodies by Chausson, Gounod and Dubois and rarely heard instrumental pieces by Massenet, Fauré and Fernand de La Tombelle round out the journey with their musical reveries.

Among the dozens or perhaps hundreds of available recordings of Pergolesi's Stabat Mater, a subgroup of recent ones has emphasized its very operatic style. Within this group, performers have gone in various directions, but a single one is represented here: sheer vocal beauty of a sort that just doesn't come along every day. The vocal line trumps the dramatic meaning of the text here, but the duets between soprano Véronique Gens and countertenor Gérard Lesne are so gorgeous that you just won't care.

La version de Véronique Gens de La Voix humaine est très attendue ! Cette « tragédie lyrique en un acte » est faite pour elle, son sens du verbe et son intensité dramatique sont au rendez-vous de ce monologue composé par Poulenc en 1958, sur un texte de Jean Cocteau. On est bien loin ici du Poulenc « léger » des années 1920. Cocteau lui fait d’ailleurs le plus beau des compliments : « Cher Francis, tu as fixé, une fois pour toutes, la façon de dire mon texte. » Véronique Gens confie avoir toujours voulu interpréter et enregistrer cette pièce ; c’est maintenant chose faite avec ses complices de l’Orchestre National de Lille et de son directeur musical, Alexandre Bloch. Également présente sur l’album, la Sinfonietta, qui est en fait une véritable symphonie, mais, comme l’écrit Nicolas Southon, « il est indéniable que l’œuvre – commandée par la BBC à Poulenc en 1947 - possède une fraîcheur et une liberté de ton qui justifient son titre ».

Véronique Gens's intense soprano shines in this program of tragic cantatas about a trio of fatally wronged Roman heroines written by the twentysomething Handel during his triumphant Italian sojourn. Here, luckless Lucrezia and abandoned Armida vacillate between love and hate for the men who wronged them and agitated Agrippina rages against the son who condemned her to death, the Emperor Nero. Gens is with these wracked souls all the way, bending her lovely voice to capture the verbal nuances of the texts; listen, for example, how she deadens her tone for Agrippina's "A me sol giunga la morte." Throughout, she stays within the stylistic frame of historically informed performance practices, as do her excellent accompanists.

After an album of French songs (Néère, Alpha 215) that earned her a Gramophone Award in 2016, Véronique Gens presents her new recital, this time with orchestra, which gives her an opportunity to display the maturity of her ‘Falcon’ soprano, the central tessitura typical of French Romantic opera, which takes its name from Cornélie Falcon, who created the works of Meyerbeer and Halévy staged in the 1830s.