Originally announced as a programme of works by thirteen different composers detailing the journey of a woman’s love throughout her lifetime, and tailor-made for Elsa Dreisig, the content of this recital was completely changed to accommodate Marianne Crebassa but retaining the scheduled accompanist Joseph Middleton. As such,a London audience had a welcome opportunity to hear the acclaimed French operatic singer in more intimate surroundings at the Wigmore Hall and with a selection that generally played to her strengths.
Crebassa started with three songs by Debussy allegedly drawing on the texts of an Ancient Greek poet by the name of Bilitis. This was an example of fake news disseminated at the end of the nineteenth century, since Debussy’s friend Pierre Louÿs had manufactured a whole cache of poems together with the back story to go with the supposed archaeological find. Singing entirely from memory, as she was later to do in the Ravel, there was an immediate sensuousness in the melodic line of La flûte de Pan, Crebassa savouring the seductive content and displaying the wonderful depths of her chest register for a phrase such as “si doucement que je l’entends à peine”. A constant smile playing on her lips, she was as persuasive in the narrative tone of La chevelure, culminating in Wagner’s infamous Tristan-chord to set the seal on a passionate outburst, as she was in the darker elements of Le tombeau des Naïdes, where the agitation in her voice was matched by the assertiveness of Joseph Middleton’s accompaniment.
There was a distinctly Mediterranean feel to Crebassa’s programme, encompassing as it did two French composers and a Catalan, so that what followed next seemed like an unnecessary diversion. For Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder she was altogether more serious of mien, the face revealing hints of deeper-lying pain, her voice pliable and nuanced, and easily stretching into her diamond-clear upper register for phrases such as “auf jenen Höhn” in the fourth song of the cycle. Despite Crebassa’s admirable projection of the text in excellent German, as well as the autumnal glow she often brought to Mahler’s setting of these poems by Friedrich Rückert, I did have two significant reservations. One concerned the vocal quality. There was a rather intrusive vibrato at the start of the cycle, and later on evidence of an operatic treatment at odds with the essential inwardness of songs cast predominantly in the minor key and which reveal a whole barrage of personal torment and anguish. The second relates to dynamic scale. I think Crebassa missed a few opportunities to scale back the intensity of the voice. After the earlier restlessness and heartache there is a volta before the final stanza of Friedrich Rückert’s concluding poem, In diesem Wetter, in diesem Braus, in which a growing softness introduces a quality of transcendence. Absolute steadiness of delivery is a prerequisite here, especially for the very last line, “Sie ruhn wie in der Mutter Haus”.
For lovers of symmetry there was an ideal sense of balance on display in this recital. Five songs each by Mahler, Mompou and Ravel, two cycles in each half of the programme, separated by two piano interludes by Debussy. Middleton brought a touch of wide-eyed innocence to La fille aux cheveux de lin and made the most of the rich arpeggio writing in Bruyères.
The name of Frederic Mompou i Dencausse is chiefly associated with compositions for the piano, though he did also write a ballet, choral pieces, guitar music and songs. He spent twenty years in Paris and regarded France as his spiritual home, strongly influenced by Satie, Fauré and Debussy. His cycle Combat del Somni, based on texts by his close friend Josep Janés i Olivé, is possibly his best known vocal work. Already in the first song, Damunt de tu només les flors, there is a vein of melancholy which Crebassa explored in depth, the association between withering flowers and the fading memory of a departed human life being particularly marked.
She developed a keenly-felt anticipatory quality for the second song, Aquesta nit un mateix vent, revelling in the questioning phrases and ascending into the majestic range of her upper register for the concluding line. She skilfully negotiated all the demands of the higher tessitura for the more extrovert Fes-me la vida transparent, the fourth in the cycle, and her generosity of tone together with the amplitude of her voice were distinguishing features in the final song, Ara no sé si et veig encar.
Ravel’s Cinq melodies populaires grecques, written in the first years of the twentieth-century, represent his first foray into folk songs. There is little that is noticeably Greek here, the translations by Ravel’s friend Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi giving the words Gallic qualities in the composer’s treatment, languorous nasals and endless vowels very much to the fore. Crebassa sounded entirely at home here, her animated body language with open palms, gently outstretched hands and quizzical looks vividly matching the vibrancy of the music, standing to attention like a soldier for Quel galant m’est comparable, and excelling in the extrovert nature and dance-like frolicsomeness of the concluding Tout gai!
In the second of her two encores, the Act 1 seguidilla Près des remparts de Séville from Bizet’s Carmen, Crebassa left me regretting she hadn’t included a little more from her operatic repertory. In this department she has very much to offer. Here was the ideal heroine strutting the stage, the voice redolent with sensuous allure, excelling in all the earthiness and range of colour so characteristic of the gypsy girl.
Alexander Hall
Debussy – Trois chansons de Bilitis; Debussy – La fille aux cheveux de lin (from Préludes Book 1); Mahler – Kindertotenlieder; Mompou – Combat del Somni; Debussy – Bruyères (from Préludes Book II); Ravel – Cinq melodies populaires grecques
Marianne Crebassa (mezzo-soprano); Joseph Middleton (piano)
Wigmore Hall, London, 25 March 2026
Top image: Marianne Crebassa
All photos © Laure Bernard/WarnerClassics