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Track(s) taken from CDH55040

À Chloris

First line:
S'il est vrai, Chloris, que tu m'aimes
composer
published 1916
author of text

Martyn Hill (tenor), Graham Johnson (piano)
Recording details: December 1981
Art Workers Guild, Queen Square, London, United Kingdom
Produced by Andrew Keener
Engineered by Antony Howell
Release date: May 1988
Total duration: 2 minutes 43 seconds
 

Other recordings available for download

Stephen Varcoe (baritone), Graham Johnson (piano)
Dame Sarah Connolly (mezzo-soprano), Eugene Asti (piano)

Reviews

‘Martyn Hill’s tenor is perfectly suited to Hahn’s deliciously sentimental idiom … most of the settings on the disc are to texts by his favourite Verlaine, including the seven Chansons grises. Hahn gages the level of sensuality perfectly, allowing the words to make their point rather than making the point on their behalf, and Hill and his accompanist Johnson relax wonderfully into this rather enticing world’ (BBC Music Magazine)
À Chloris is beyond doubt the summit of Reynaldo Hahn’s art as a pasticheur, and it ranks as perhaps the most successful example of musical time-travelling in the French mélodie repertoire (if one excludes that peerless masterpiece of the madrigal style, Fauré’s Clair de lune). À Chloris has charm, elegance, gravity and the ability to move audiences—what more could one ask of a song, whether or not it is a pastiche? The fact that it is based on the striding bass line of Bach’s ‘Air on the G-string’ seems irrelevant: one smiles at the composer’s audacity at the beginning, but one stays to listen to the music, Hahn’s music, in its own right. It uses one of his favourite devices where the accompaniment is a piano piece with its own momentum; over this the voice embroiders an inspired overlay which seems half sung and half spoken, moving with conversational grace between whispered confidences and declarations of love in full voice. Here is a different world from the Charles d’Orléans settings—this is seventeenth-century France where the medieval has ceded to the baroque. All the grace of Louis XIII’s epoch seems encapsulated here, but there is also an undertone of sadness.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 1996

Other albums featuring this work

Hahn: Songs
CDA67141/22CDs
The exquisite hour
Studio Master: SIGCD072Download onlyStudio Master FLAC & ALAC downloads available
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