Dupont, Hahn & Fauré: 3 French Song Cycles

“3 French Song Cycles - Dupont, Hahn, Faure” by the soprano Charlotte de Rothschild has just been released on 5 February by Nimbus. Rothschild, who is highly regarded as a singer of Japanese songs, together with her accompanist Adrian Farmer, has embarked in recent years on a series of precious, niche recordings of neglected, 19th century British composers such as Roger Quilter, Norman Peterkin and Cyril Scott.

Top billing in this time’s French song collection goes to Reynaldo Hahn with 13 songs. Among the poems he set to music were “Les Feuilles Blessees” by Jean Moreas, a 19th century proponent of symbolism. His subdued, subtle tones remind one of a darkling plain, and Rothschild sings them like a lament. Next come eight songs by Gabriel Edouard Dupont, who died in 1914 at the age of 36, and whose work is rarely heard even in his homeland of France. His style is both simple and complex, and detached from this world. Among his songs, “Ophelia”, which says that humans are merely part of nature, is imbued with a sense of the transience of life. In singing these songs Rothschild’s tone becomes dreamy and mysterious. If you listen through from the beginning to the last 8 songs, by Gabriel Faure, then Hahn is a wide plain, Dupont is wind and air, and Faure is light. It is as if Rothschild, in order to appease the natural elements, invites and even presses the listener to travel from the depths of the abyss up into heaven. She says that in the midst of Covid she made the recording in a short window just before the first lockdown, and her CD makes one feel the immediacy of life and death.

Rothschild is now working with Farmer on a three-part album of the 19th century British composer Cecil Armstrong Gibbs. After that she plans to tackle folk songs from the Hebrides islands off the north-west of Scotland, which were collected by the 19th century musician Marjorie Kennedy Fraser, and is taking up “the challenge of Gaelic”. It will be a pleasure to see where she takes us next." Ms. Yuko Yamagata, Recordo Geijiutsu (English Translation)