Deep scores under penetrating eyes, thick wild locks and artfully loose-fitting clothing – Théophile Gautier is one of the most arresting portrait subjects of the 19th century. A painter and professional Bohemian in his younger years, Gautier became a pluriform writer, producing plays, novels, travelogues and poems. He was also an art, music, dance and literary critic. He wrote the scenario for Giselle and surrendered his heart to the role’s creator, the great ballerina Carlotta Grisi. She did not reciprocate, so he logically married her sister. Soprano Elizabeth Watts constructed her French song programme around Gautier’s poetry. Although he was a fully-fledged Romantic, Gautier’s metaphors often appear uncomplicated at first, only to diffuse into a symbolist landscape where love, death and longing converge. They do so most dazzlingly in the six poems that Hector Berlioz, his lifelong friend, set as the song cycle Les nuits d’été. This cycle made up the second half of this fascinating programme, which featured several pairs of settings of the same text by different composers. It was interesting to compare, for example, Duparc’s resigned dirge Lamento, with its distressed change of tempo in the last strophe, to the meandering thoughts in the fifth song of the Berlioz cycle, Au cimetière.
Unfortunately, Watts was suffering from the flu and, although brimming over with emotional energy, much of her performance was managed rather than memorable. Feeling tired, she scrapped three early Debussy songs, including a Séguidille inspired by the composer’s first muse, Marie Blanche Vasnier, whom he met while accompanying singing lessons. Judging, among others, by the dizzying roulades in the Séguidille, the very pretty and very married Madame Vasnier must have had a head for heights and killer coloratura. It was wise of Watts, if disappointing for the audience, to leave out this number, because her indisposition affected the voice at both extremes, and her top notes sometimes took on an irksome hardness. At the other extreme, the threnodic descents into chest register in Berlioz’s Sur les lagunes ended in hollow notes. Watts’ greatest challenge seemed to be getting her voice to respond flexibly. Working with diminished expressive means, she tended to compensate with forte singing that was much too loud for the intimate Recital Hall at the Concertgebouw.
Such big vocal statements suited Bizet’s quasi-operatic Absence and Chausson’s La Caravane, although the latter’s low tessitura tested the singer to the limit. In De Falla’s Séguidille, a more authentic-sounding composition than its text twin by Debussy, Watts sounded a tad too earnest for the portrait of the spicy Spanish dancer. The other two songs in the De Falla set, the dreamy Les Colombes (The Doves) and the facetious Chinoiserie, could also have used a lighter touch. Pianist Roger Vignoles accompanied them all with delicious fluidity. Indeed, his clear and nuanced playing was a constant pleasure. He made every note speak, echo and ripple, treating each song as a unique painting. Well-prepared throughout, not a scrap of sheet music in sight, Watts was similarly expressive, but her voice refused to bend all the way. In Berlioz’s Villanelle, for instance, she brought the full brightness of her soprano to the young lovers’ jaunt, but leaned too heavily on the words at the end of each phrase.