This album came about through my desire to record Lakmé, a role that has been very dear to my heart since I first performed it on stage in 2012. It’s a part of which I know and love every single bar.
For the character of Lakmé, Léo Delibes composed some of the most beautiful music ever written for coloratura soprano. His artistic approach was essentially a French one in that he always made the voice the centre of attention, with an orchestration that is at times diaphanous (when the heroine recites a prayer) and at times dazzling (in the great love duets). It was this work that sparked my love for French nineteenth-century opera. But Lakmé also came about within the context of European artists becoming more open to influences from distant lands. Western ears were at that time keen to be taken on musical and poetic journeys, and people were increasingly receptive to perfumes from afar.
This collection explores the dream of the East cultivated by Delibes and later by Maurice Delage, who actually went on an extended visit to India and brought back with him the modal colours of Indian music. It also touches on Japan and China, as seen through the prism of Messager’s Madame Chrysanthème and Stravinsky’s Rossignol, and Egypt, with the incantation sung by La Charmeuse
in Thaïs. The element of fantasy also takes on a more folk-like and popular dimension, with settings by Ambroise Thomas and Berlioz of Ophelia’s strange song. With his music for Mélisande and Ariel, both of whom use their voices to sing and to charm, Debussy uses the exoticism of the modal scale to disconcert the listener and evoke an unspecified faraway place.
So, ‘far from the real world’, as Lakmé says before her ‘Liebestod’, like the fantasy image of a distant country – let us indulge an innocent pleasure, and dream...
(Sabine Devieilhe, 2017)
