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Track(s) taken from CDH55040

Infidélité

First line:
Voici l'orme qui balance
composer
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 26 seconds
 

Other recordings available for download

Dame Felicity Lott (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)
Infidélité is a perfect pastel, like Offrande a portrait of a tentative love that is doomed to disappointment and incomprehension. The accompaniment oscillates, a quaver chord in each hand. Harmonies change only with the greatest subtlety in the right hand, the left maintaining a pedal on a succession of open fifths for up to fifteen bars at a time. The vocal line seems caught within a small circle of notes as if to reflect the unchanging constancy of the narrator. The calm atmosphere of the evening is beautifully caught, and the whole song seems redolent of the perfumes of ebonies and lilacs. All of this is to set up the poignant change of harmony on ‘vous’ at the end, masterfully preceded by an unaccompanied bar where the voice is released from the strait-jacket of those gently pulsating quavers. I have in my possession a copy of this song (with a drawing of the stone bench, of course) inscribed by ‘R.H.’ to Madeleine Lemaire—‘Souvenir de Réveillon’. As Reynaldo met Proust at Réveillon it is all too tempting to wonder whether it was the failure of this relationship that the composer had in mind when inscribing this song for his hostess.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 1996

Other albums featuring this work

Hahn: Songs
CDA67141/22CDs
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