Fauré's more or less secret spirit

Despite its English title, the CD The Secret Fauré offers a fine retrospective of fin-de-siècle works, some less well known, but all faithful to Gabriel Fauré's profoundly French soul. Authenticity seems guaranteed with the reproduction of a seascape by Eugène Boudin. Interpretation of this corpus is entrusted to the Basel Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Ivor Bolton, the Balthasar-Neumann Women's Choir and two renowned soloists, who make use of Bärenreiter's recent critical edition to Caligula, Shylock and Penelope. Yet, despite the existence of countless passages of great beauty, something essential is missing from this interpretation of Fauré.

While the ultra-spacious acoustics of Dornach's Goetheanum bring an airy, alluring sonority to the orchestra's magnificent solos, they swell the tutti and parasitize transparency. While the standing waves in this hall are technically better mastered than on a recent Beethoven CD, they frequently create a thickness that masks the fine nuances of the orchestration and hinders understanding of the texts, sung by the women's choir and the two soloists. It's true that consonant diction doesn't seem to be Olga Peretyatko's main preoccupation, as she pronounces French in her own way, while enjoying her lyrical flights of fancy. The rich, articulate voice of tenor Benjamin Bruns in Shylock poses few problems. With a magnifying glass to read the texts, printed small in the booklet in favor of double-page photographs, we discover the beauty of the texts and the seven stanzas that the soprano does not sing.

Fauré's interpretation requires the gradual, tireless construction of a long-term architectural vision, where each phrase, long or short, should prepare the next. On this CD, the orchestral works sometimes suffer from a slight over-interpretation that precipitates attention to the immediate, without sufficiently underpinning the structure and maintaining breathing. Moreover, the Caligula would gain in strength if we reduced the pauses between movements, and Pelléas and Mélisande wouldn't need three seconds of silence between its first two phrases! Better than words, listening to Ernest Ansermet's version, recorded with the Prelude from Penelope fifty-six years ago (Decca/Eloquence), exemplifies the natural sobriety also found in Armin Jordan and a whole tradition of French conductors. Yes, if Fauré's spirit remains elusive, it is by no means secret...