Radio 3 Record Review
27th April 2019
Record of the Week

Gramophone Magazine
June 2019
Editor's Choice

Véronique Gens (soprano)

Orchestre National de Lille, Alexandre Bloch

Ernest Chausson is a most unusual figure in French music, positioned at the crossroads where the romanticism of Berlioz and Franck meet the language of Wagner and the symbolism of the young Debussy. His Poème de l amour et de la mer is a unique score for the period and certainly his greatest work; simultaneously a profane, naturistic cantata, a monologue, and a song cycle, it was composed between 1882 and 1892.

Véronique Gens is recording this cycle for the first time, although she has already issued Le temps des lilas with Susan Manoff at the piano for her disc Néère (ALPHA 215), about which Ernst Van Bek wrote in Classiquenews: it mesmerises with the nuancing of its colours, the allusive precision of every sung word. Véronique Gens talent is equally on display in this recording too, with the Orchestre National de Lille an orchestra she already knows well under Alexandre Bloch, its new chief conductor, whose appointment and first concerts and recordings have already caused a sensation... The Symphony in B flat major completes this programme: a summit of French symphonic writing, for some a milestone as important as the Symphony in D of Chausson's teacher.

"A performance that ranks, unquestionably, among the finest to date. Superbly sung, and wonderfully well conducted and played by Alexandre Bloch and his Lille orchestra, this is an interpretation of great beauty and insight. Gens’s dark tone and her ability to fuse sound with sense allow her both to encompass the work’s rapturous lyricism and to map out the psychological subtlety of its depiction of the painful end of an affair." - Gramophone Magazine, June 2019.