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Track(s) taken from CDH55040

La chère blessure

First line:
Comme d'un sein ouvert la main arrache une arme
composer
Reynaldo Hahn (1874-1947)
1900
author of text
Augustine-Malvina Souville Blanchecotte (1830-1878)

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: 3 minutes 18 seconds
 

Other recordings available for download

Alice Coote (mezzo-soprano), Graham Johnson (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)
A Romantic writer who won praise from none other than the redoubtable critic Charles Sainte-Beuve for her poetry, Augustine-Malvina Blanchecotte creates in La chère blessure the psychological portrayal of remorse and guilt that are actually cherished because they impel the persona back to a lover he or she once mistreated. For such dark complexities of the human heart, Reynaldo Hahn concocts wonderfully brooding, dissonance-laden harmonies against which the voice mostly murmurs on repeated pitches. When the persona sings of ripping ‘your name’ out of her heart in the past, the vault upwards at ‘arraché’ (plucked, torn, ripped) is all the more intense in the wake of the chanting that precedes it.

from notes by Susan Youens © 2015

Other albums featuring this work

L'heure exquise
Alice Coote (mezzo-soprano), Graham Johnson (piano)
Studio Master: CDA67962Studio Master FLAC & ALAC downloads available

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