This weekend, “the” Marie-Nicole Lemieux album that we have been waiting for for so many years is released: the summer nights by Berlioz. The result justifies patience, because much more than a recording it is a legacy for history, the fruit of the quintessence of an art which goes far beyond singing.
To understand what is happening in this disc, we must go back to an interview given by Marie-Nicole Lemieux at Duty in the cozy lounge of an Amsterdam hotel during the Metropolitan Orchestra’s European tour in November 2017.
The singer told us how, in 2000, the famous conductor and guardian of a great tradition of French music Michel Plasson, after hearing her at the Queen Elisabeth of Belgium competition, invited her to Toulouse. “He picked up the phone and said to my agent, ‘I want to do the summer nights with this little Canadian.” And there I had a very important encounter: Mr. Plasson took me by the cheek, he said to me: “My little one, come on, let’s go to work.” He brought in his pianist, Bob, and he made me work for two hours as if he saw something in me and absolutely wanted to pass on to me what he knew about French phrasing. »
Pitfalls
The sources of what we hear in this record which will be released one day in the fall of 2023 are found there and in everything that will bear fruit subsequently. “For two or three years, I have been able to do what I want, especially in French music. I feel good, vocally,” admitted Marie-Nicole Lemieux in 2017 while she sang Summer nights on tour with Yannick Nézet-Séguin. “My teacher told me last week that I am at the peak of my voice. I’ve been working with her for 22 years and she always told me: “You’ll see: the zenith is in your forties”. »
In 2017, we heard that the summer nights were ready. Then, it was a sort of obstacle course to immortalize this interpretation. Which leader, under what conditions? The final hoped-for meeting with Michel Plasson failed. It was a form of mourning for the singer. Yannick Nézet-Séguin? They were not with the same record publisher. Toulouse? Bordeaux? To complicate everything further came the pandemic. So the project came to fruition in May 2021 in Monte-Carlo with Kazuki Yamada. And everything is there, orchestrally too, with real audacity in the sound characterization (perfectly balanced brass in “Sur les lagunes”, lacerating squeak in the middle of “Au cemetery”).
The supplements, Persian melodies of Saint-Saëns and Scheherazade by Ravel, captured in July 2022, benefit from the same care, the same listening and complicity.
Intricate art
So what’s so important here? The incarnation and transmission, to the highest degree, of the art of French melody: the art of saying while singing. The vast majority of singers do not hesitate to sacrifice the text to produce the “ideal” sound by placing their voice. It’s more or less obvious, but everyone makes compromises here and there. Marie-Nicole Lemieux celebrates poetry by singing and does so with perfect inflections and almost unreal control. The voice or “vocal performance” never distracts from the words.
We arrive at a consideration which echoes the words of the young soprano Elisabeth St-Gelais recounting her experience of the Prix d’Europe in today’s DMag: when the artist arrives with such a level of premeditation and finishing, he succeeds to an inexplicable mixture of control and abandonment. When, in “The Unknown Island”, Marie-Nicole Lemieux sings “Lead me, says the beauty, To the faithful shore where we always love”, we literally perceive the smile, the happiness, the candor. With “Sur les lagunes” and “Au cemetery”, beyond the lesson in singing and style, it grabs us and twists our hearts.
The sound recording, which places the singer very much in the forefront, could be intractable, cruel, but makes the feat even more palpable. The only words that fit are “shattering” and “stunning”.
The coupling with Scheherazade de Ravel is always eloquent. The way a singer inflects the pronunciation of the first word, “Asia”, already says a lot. Obviously, we won’t blame Marie-Nicole Lemieux for bad taste! The gentle pulsation of restrained languor of “L’indifferent” is hypnotic. The third cycle, Persian melodies by Saint-Saëns, is a new reconstruction of the Palazzetto Bru Zane of the composer’s orchestration of an orientalizing cycle composed in 1870. It gives its touch of originality to the program.
The next step, the next challenge, will now be to achieve the (The song of the earth, lieder cycles with orchestra) great Mahler records that this voice calls. Here too the choice of partner, and, above all, of the orchestra will be difficult and crucial.