Ernest Chausson died in 1899 at the age of just 44, when he lost control of his bicycle while cycling down a hill and crashed into a wall. He had composed about 40 works, most of them vocal, of which a dozen are large-scale, and include one completed opera, Le Roi Arthus.
He remains a pivotal figure in 19th-century French music, a Wagnerian who provides a link between the Romanticism of his teachers César Franck and Massenet and the modernism of Debussy, who was one of his closest friends until the pair fell out over what Chausson saw as Debussy’s promiscuity.
The two works on conductor Alexandre Bloch’s latest release are Chausson’s Op 19 and Op 20. Both date from the early 1890s. The Poème de l’Amour et de la Mer weaves together settings of poems by Maurice Bouchor – three in each of two movements, separated by a short orchestral interlude – to create something between an orchestral song cycle and a solo cantata, which traces the course of a love affair, and ends with a hymn to lost love, Le Temps des Lilas. The music certainly has echoes of Berlioz and Wagner, while it also anticipates Debussy’s La Mer, composed a decade later. Above all, though, the Poème is a wonderful vehicle for any soprano, and Véronique Gens floats Chausson’s vocal lines effortlessly over the orchestra with supreme elegance and fabulous clarity; full texts are provided with the disc, but Gens’s singing is so perfectly enunciated, so pure in its phrasing and articulation, you really don’t need them.
In its way, the Symphonie is equally fascinating. It’s audibly influenced by Wagner – the opening of the central slow movement comes straight from the prelude to the third act of Tristan und Isolde, while passages in the finale hark back to Klingsor’s magic kingdom in Parsifal – and also looks forward to Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, while following the Franckian prescription of cyclic form, to bind the three movements thematically together. But as Bloch’s fine performance with the Lille orchestra shows, it’s a work that easily transcends all these associations, and deserves its own regular place in the concert hall. The main reason to listen, however, is to luxuriate in the glorious performance of the Poème, from one of the great singers of our time.
