“Nostalgia is not what it used to be” (Simone Signoret)
Like most of us, I don’t live in the past. In a long life devoted to music, that means continually savoring the thread of renewed and ever-changing experiences. You’re always thrilled for the next step, to find out the result of the next unplanned adventure. The cliché is often true: the present project always is the most passionate one. However, I was recently urged by dear friend Michel Bosc to post to Youtube some excerpts from a forgotten record I was lucky to have been asked to do back in my early days here in France, in 1982-83 to be specific! So last night I posted an excerpt of the cycle ‘L’Horizon chimérique’ to Youtube. It was Fauré’s last song cycle, written in the Autumn of 1921. The marvelous texts tell of a young man’s longings for great adventures, beyond the horizon…
That was for me surely the chance of a lifetime, to collaborate with the experienced and very kind pianist Dalton Baldwin. Most of you know his famous recordings with the irreplaceable Gérard Souzay. Harmonia Mundi graciously offered me carte blanche for the program, and Jacques and I finally decided to select 18 favorite Gabriel Fauré mélodies, some very well-known, some less frequently heard, all in the original keys (except for the ‘Sérénade du Bourgeois Gentilhomme’ a rare song suggested to me by Souzay and Baldwin). Instinctively I knew this was the time at age 32 to record these songs (especially the dreamlike ‘Diane, Séléné’ for example) as my repertoire, following my voice, was already tending to the richer and deeper roles that would follow, and characterize my career.