The compact disc as a physical
object, whether the music is classical or pop, is of interest to very
few people nowadays. One response from musicians has been an adjustment
to the new climate of downloadable single tracks and bite-sized clips
that don’t suffer from being part of a shuffle. Patricia Petibon’s new
disc does exactly the opposite. Her program happens to contain nearly
thirty tracks, but they all go together as a single performance, and
they need to be heard in the order in which she presents them. The
program is at its core a song recital, but
Petibon and pianist Susan Manoff have invited some off-the-cuff participation from a second
pianist, a second vocalist, an accordion player and a percussionist. The
structure is something of an after-dinner talent show, with relentless
high spirits to start, a passing moment halfway through when everybody
gets a little soupy and sentimental as the Pernod kicks in, a strategic
regrouping for a few big numbers, and one sad song too many at the end
to send everybody to the pile of coats on the bed. At times, there’s a
deliberately amateurish quality. The second vocalist is Olivier Py, who
is not quite a singer (he is quite a director, having mounted a
production of Berg’s
Lulu for Petibon), and the percussion
parts give the illusion of improvisations that non-musicians might toss
in from the sidelines.
There are a few of the French
repertoire’s greatest hits, by Fauré and Poulenc, but most of the music
is unfamiliar. There’s a good deal of Satie, including two of the zippy Sports et Divertissements
(piano only, without the sardonic words). If Petibon is perfectly
capable of singing two un-ironic love songs, she nonetheless might
separate them with a Satie can-can. But Satie can also have a side that
is quietly aghast, and his brief “Désespoir agréable” makes a perfect
piano transition into the set of downcast numbers that begins with
Fauré’s “Spleen.” There is a particularly clever transition where
Satie’s “Grande Ritournelle” for piano four-hands at first seems to be a
gussied-up version of Poulenc’s song “Les gars qui vont à la fête,” but
it is the real thing, and the real Poulenc song follows. Among the
discoveries are Reynaldo Hahn’s “Pholoé,” a rare song about aging, and
the music of Léo Ferré, who turns out to be right up there with Michel
Legrand.
Petibon is having such a good time
managing to be loose and crazy even though this is a studio production
that she disarms criticism. She can be dirty without being sleazy in the
duets with Py. She can drip crocodile tears at the end of “Les gars”
but then sing Poulenc’s “Voyage à Paris” without mocking it and deliver
two of those quietly devastating Poulenc songs, “Hier” and “Aux
Officiers de la Garde Blanche,” with equilibrium. It’s perhaps worth
noting that a tiny Manuel Rosenthal song about a zoo elephant who wets
his pants has been turned into something impossibly grand by the full
company here, and it is funny. But Régine Crespin used to stop the show
with this number by underplaying it. Times change, and I love this
album. Twice, by the time Rosenthal songs came up, I felt that one piece
too many had all that extra percussion. And then twice, just as I do
when the cantina tune keeps coming back in Milhaud’s Le Boeuf sur le Toit,
I succumbed unreservedly with a giggle. Madoff, among many virtues,
totally gets the deadpan, unreadable quality of Satie’s accompaniments,
and the idiomatic English translations of Susannah Howe and James
Harding add immeasurably to the considerable enjoyment of this release. (William R. Braun)
