Wigmore Hall
La Dame de Monte Carlo
La Voix humaine
Anna Caterina Antonacci (soprano)
Donald Sulzen (piano)
Quite an opening to my
2015-16 Wigmore Hall season! For this lunchtime concert, Anna Caterina
Antonacci and Donald Sulzen performed the piano version of Poulenc’s La Voix humaine, preceded by his final,
not dissimilar vocal work, La Dame de
Monte Carlo. Both have texts by Cocteau; both are far less conventionally ‘melodic’
than one would expect from this most melodic of composers; both are monologues
intended for Denise Duval, portraying women on the verge, at least, of
breakdown.
La
Dame de Monte Carlo is
anything but an easy way in for a soprano. Antonacci was herself, or rather the
woman whose persona she assumed, from the very outset, always very well
supported – and more than that – by Sulzen. ‘C’est joli de dire: “je joue”.
Cela vous met le feu aux joues et cela vous allume l’œil.’ It was a gamble
indeed, and it paid off. Moreover, it did have our eyes light up, as she so
seductively span out the end of the phrase. Likewise we saw her ‘feathers and
veils’ (‘mes plumes et mes voiles’), or rather thought we did, as she raised
her arm. There was no doubting the singing actress here. Pauses told as much as
words, for instance after ‘Et ils m’accusent d’être sale, de porter malheur
dans leurs salles, dans leurs sales salles en stuc.’ There were a sadness and a
defiance here that spoke, in Cocteau’s words, of the ‘lamentable story of an
old, abandoned, miserable floozy’, and yet went beyond what one fancied words
alone might have accomplished. The final ‘Monte Carlo’, upon the woman’s
resolution to throw herself into the sea there, was operatic in the very best
sense, as was the dryness of the piano response. The French ‘sec’ inevitably
sprang to mind.
The main course inevitably
encompassed a wider variety of emotions. Initially seated next to a table, on
which an orange telephone as stylish as her performance was placed, Antonacci
was in character from the moment she sat down. The fascinating tonalities and
almost Schoenbergian motivic development of the piano part set the scene, but
there was no doubt whose show it was. ‘Tu me connais, je suis incapable de
prendre sur moi’ had a splendid sense of irony, whether with respect to the
character or the metatheatricality, all the more so since it was delivered with
passion rather than irony. Ghosts from Poulenc’s past and present seemed to
haunt the performance, although there was little of the carefree. Harmonies
from Dialogues des Carmélites assumed
new resonance, as did the common notion of fear: ‘Peur? Non, je n’aurai pas
peur … c’est pire.’ It almost certainly was worse, since here there was no sign
of Divine Grace. Again, the ‘Allô’ when Antonacci feared she had been cut off
spoke of real fear, not something assumed. This was great acting as much as
anything else. Even the downpour outside and consequent darkening of the light
seemed perfectly timed for the ‘production’. And the speech-like writing proved
beyond doubt, just as it would have done had she been singing Monteverdi, that
recitative can be at least as expressive as aria. Audience reaction was as warm
as one would have expected.