Artfully arranged white lilies flanked Wigmore Hall’s stage, but roses were the flower of choice in the perfumed texts of the romances and mélodies performed by Cyrille Dubois and Tristan Raës. Entitled ‘Fauré by Nature’ – and, as reported last October, part of a five-season project presenting all Fauré’s songs at Wigmore Hall – the programme spanned six composers and the period from the early 1870s to 1914.
The discreetly rapturous ‘La rose’, setting a poem by the Parnassian Leconte de Lisle, appeared in the recital’s central sequence of Fauré, which was preceded by Bizet and Chausson and followed by two sets of rarities: Petits poèmes du bord de l’eau, six aquatically themed miniatures by Hedwige Chrétien (1859-1944) and Odelettes by Guy Ropartz (1864-1955), ambitiously conceived, sometimes scena-like songs. If the Ropartz dates from just before World War I, its aesthetic still bespeaks the Belle Époque, not least in some enigmatic echoes of Debussy’s Chansons de Bilitis of 1897. It was the quizzical narratives of the closing group, Ravel’s Histoires naturelles of 1906, that most looked forward to the rest of the 20th century. As Dubois pointed out in one of his concise spoken interventions, 2025 marks the 150th anniversary both of Ravel’s birth and Bizet’s death, thus closing a contextual loop for the programme.
Dubois, who grew up in Normandy and trained at the conservatoires of Rennes and Paris, is a naturally engaging performer. Though he sang from a score throughout the recital, his communication with the audience was never compromised – his body language remained fluid and his pleasure in singing was evident. His voice, best described as a light lyric tenor, is luminously projected, rather ‘linear’ and at times penetrating. In the hall, there was minimal evidence of the fluttery vibrato that can appear in his recordings. Rather than applying a variegated palette of vocal colours, he makes his expressive points through a daring range of dynamics – delicate ‘voix mixte’ pianissimo, thrusting fortissimo, or an arresting diminuendo on a sustained climactic note – supple phrasing, sometimes impressively long-breathed, and precise diction. If he exemplifies Gallic refinement, he does so without preciosity. And he clearly has a sense of humour. In Ravel’s ‘Le grillon’, there is a brief, suspenseful silence after the cricket has buried himself in the ground. Someone in the audience coughed, and there was a special piquancy in the tenor’s delivery, with a knowing smile, of the next line: “On n’entend plus rien.” At that moment, as throughout the recital, Raës was an exemplary partner, savouring the often gorgeous piano writing – whether chaste, playful, pictorial, sensuous or sumptuous – while always retaining a sense of proportion.
This was not one of those recitals that ebbed and flowed; it traced an embracing arc, and each section was satisfying and engrossing in its own terms. Filling out the bouquet of especially memorable moments, there was the deliciously flirtatious waltz of Bizet’s ‘La coccinelle’, the hothouse eroticism of Chausson’s ‘Le colibri’, the brooding melancholy of Fauré’s ‘Automne’, Chrétien’s sparkling sequence of six compact water-colours, the modal inflections of the a cappella opening to Ropartz’s ‘Je n’ai rien que trois feuilles d’or’, and, in the Ravel, the sense of rapt wonder in ‘Le martin-pêcheur’ as the colourful bird perched on the fisherman’s rod.
The first of the two encores, Fauré’s hovering ‘Le secret’, continued to evoke nature with its references to morning, night and sunset. The concern of the second, the seductive ‘J’aime l’amour’ from Bizet’s one-act opéra-comique Djamileh, was almost entirely with natural urges.
Yehuda Shapiro
Programme:
Georges Bizet: Chanson d’avril; Le matin; Après l’hiver; Douce mer; La coccinelle
Ernest Chausson: Printemps triste; Le colibri; Le temps des lilas
Gabriel Fauré: Le papillon et la fleur; Mai; L’aurore; Automne; Aurore; La rose; Dans la forêt de septembre
Hedwige Chrétien: Petits poèmes du bord de l’eau (La rivière; La barque; Les saules; La lune; L’ondine; L’hiver)
Guy Ropartz: Odelettes (Un petit roseau m’a suffi; Si tu disais; Chante si doucement; Je n’ai rien que trois feuilles d’or)
Maurice Ravel: Histoires naturelles (Le paon; Le grillon; Le cygnet; Le martin-pêcheur; La pintade)
Cyrille Dubois (tenor), Tristan Raës (piano)
Wigmore Hall, London, 11 May 2025
All photos © Darius Weinberg/Wigmore Hall
The recital was live-streamed and can be watched on Wigmore Hall’s website.