French tenor Cyrille Dubois has collected some of the better known Britten works “en français” for this recording. One normally hears these works performed by English singers in what is pretty much an “official” Britten style so I was intrigued to hear them interpreted by a native French speaker, albeit one with a track record of performing Britten’s operas, song cycles and choral works!
The first piece is the early Quatre chansons françaises, performed with orchestra in this case the Orchestre national de Metz Grand Est with David Reiland conducting. The singing here is quite stylish and distinctly French; perhaps a little more emphatic than one is accustomed too but it works. The orchestra copes admirably with the dense and colourful orchestral writing. It includes Paul Verlaine’s “Chanson d’automne” with the famous opening “Les sanglots longs des violins” though in 1928 the composer could not have known the significance that line would assume later.
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The death last week of Dame Felicity Lott had me thinking about English singers of that generation who featured a lot in the first live opera and recordings that I experienced back in the 1970s. A bit of digging around led me to a 1993 recording of Britten’s The Turn of the Screw with Philip Langridge (who died in 2010) as Quint and Felicity Lott (not yet a Dame) as the Governess. It also, perhaps surprisingly, features American Wagnerian Nadine Secunde as Miss Jessel. Less surprisingly, it was recorded in Aldeburgh with Steuart Bedford conducting.
