Recording of the Week, Véronique Gens in Poulenc's La Voix Humaine

I’ve been eagerly awaiting today’s Recording of the Week for quite some time now – seventeen years, to be precise. It was back in 2006, during my first job in a record shop, that I fell in love with both Poulenc’s gut-wrenching one-woman opera La Voix Humaine (via Felicity Lott’s recording with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande) and with the voice and artistry of Véronique Gens - whose Tragediennes knocked me for six thanks to her combination of elegance and visceral dramatic instinct as well as her supremely expressive way with the French language. Since then I’ve hoped that the stars would one day align for Gens to bring Poulenc’s tragic, mercurial Everywoman to life, and the results exceed even my high expectations.

As she explained to me over the phone yesterday morning (in a conversation mercifully free of the dropped connections which so frustrate Poulenc’s ‘sad and lovely child’), Gens has deliberately bided her time before tackling the role of Elle, which makes near-unique demands on the performer in terms of both emotional and vocal stamina. The 45-minute opera depicts one side of the final, interruption-strewn telephone-call between a distraught woman and the lover who’s recently left her, and even in the brief moments where she’s not actually singing there’s no question of breathing-space: Gens ruefully pointed out that ‘nobody, not even the performer, actually knows what this guy’s saying on the other end of the phone’, so that all her energies are focused on imagining his responses and reacting to them in the moment.

And she does it supremely well. Bringing Elle to life in a fully-staged production is challenging enough, but even from the confines of a recording-studio Gens conjures up a three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood woman who can switch from louche playfulness to abject desolation in a heartbeat. When we first meet her upbraiding a hapless switchboard-operator, she’s very much the imperious grande dame, with a poise and edge to her tone that’s familiar from her recordings of eighteenth-century operatic heroines – but what’s most remarkable about her interpretation is how much she emphasises Elle’s warmth and wit as well as her anger, paranoia and heartbreak.

Gens seems at pains to emphasise that the qualities which presumably attracted Elle’s lover in the first place are still very much there, even in the immediate aftermath of what she eventually admits was a suicide-attempt after the picture she initially paints of ‘living her best life’ unravels under pressure. And as with her matchless portrayals of Classical heroines like Armide and Alceste, she never descends into scenery-chewing melodrama even when the emotional temperature hits boiling-point: disregarding the numerous instructions to sob outright, she instead makes eloquent use of the mere sound of her breathing, and her diction throughout remains so cut-glass that French-speakers will have no need of the text provided in the booklet (non-Francophones, I’m afraid there’s no translation included).

It's very much set up by what’s gone before, but the ending may well spring a surprise – every staged production of the opera I’ve seen closes with Elle’s suicide, and until I listened to this recording I’d never registered that this isn’t explicitly indicated in the text…There’s a certain je ne sais quoi in Gens’s final inflection of ‘Je t’aime’ that suggests that Elle lives to fight another day, and when I asked her about this she confirmed that she firmly believes that ‘Elle is strong, and in time she’ll be ready for another love-story’…

Indeed, there’s a secondary love-story of sorts playing out on this recording already – the long-term relationship between Gens, the Orchestre National de Lille and their relatively new Music Director Alexandre Bloch, with whom she adores working thanks to the freshness of his approach and willingness to jettison performance-conventions which don’t serve the music as written. Zip, energy and clarity are the watchwords of the companion-piece here, Poulenc’s Haydnesque Sinfonietta from 1947 - but if anything they shine still brighter in the opera, providing some exceptionally vivid clues as to the words and emotional state of the elusive ‘Lui’ at the other end of the line. Might they be prevailed upon to tackle Britten’s Les Illuminations with Gens next? I do hope so…