Honegger La Danse des Morts, Milhaud L’Homme et son Désir. Lambert Wilson (narrator), Anne-Sophie Schmidt, Claire Brua, Hubert Claessens, Chœur de Radio France, Orchestre de Picardie, Edmon Colomer. Calliope Collection Rencontres CAL 9526 (2004) barcode 794881726028
Recorded September 2002 in the Cathedral of Soissons
A good Danse des Morts that stumbles on its narrator – hard to walk in, but also out of the footsteps of Jean-Louis Barrault
Originally posted on Amazon.com, 21 March 2013
In March 1941, shortly after the compositions’s world premiere (given in Basel by its commissioner Paul Sacher on March 2, 1940) and the French premiere in German-occupied Paris (26 January 1941), Charles Munch made a historical recording of Honegger’s La Danse des Morts (The Dance of the Dead) (on a text by the famous poet, playwright and diplomat Paul Claudel, also the author of the book of Joan at the Stake). Historical not only because of its vintage, but also because of its insurpassable interpretive greatness. It benefited not only from Munch’s high-strung and biting conducting, the total commitment of all those involved and especially the choral forces, the moving plangency of baritone Charles Panzera, but also from the extraordinary histrionics of narrator Jean-Louis Barrault – something like France’s Lawrence Olivier. Barrault didn’t shy before Claudel’s mystically Catholic text, he impersonated an hallucinated prophet, a biblical Savonarola. I’ll venture that Barrault’s performance was possible only in an era dominated by the radio. In today’s world, in which the movies and TV have imposed more “realistic” restraint, it is likely that nobody would dare. Yet Claudel’s text requires nothing short of it (see my review of La France Résistante – link will open a new tab).
However, Munch’s recording suffered some horribly frustrating flaws: the antiquated 1941 sonics made the words sung often unintelligible, and whatever happened in the orchestra had to be imagined rather than heard, some of the densest parts were mere noise. Also, it had cuts, in the orchestral introduction and a more substantial one in the 5th movement, “La Réponse de Dieu” (The Response of God). Nonetheless, although “La Danse des Morts” is one of Honegger’s most powerful and impactful compositions, not many recordings followed Munch’s pioneering one, and again I think that it is because it was such a great version that nobody dared. Nobody wants to imitate or pastiche Barrault, yet it is hard to imagine another way. I am only aware of one at the end of the LP era, recorded in 1981 by the French label Calliope, with an obscure youth orchestra led by an obscure conductor, Henri Vachey, and my recollection was that it failed on a week and meek narrator. In fact, listening to it again (a few months after posting this review), I now realize that it was a great version. It was reissued on CD only in 1992, on Calliope CAL 9855 (link to my review).
So Calliope seems to have a fondness for La Danse des Morts, with this new recording from 2002. Before this one, the French label Erato published, in 1990, the first truly professional recording in modern stereo, with Michel Corboz and the Portuguese Gulbenkian Orchestra & Chorus (Erato 2292-45520-2). It was, overall, fine… except, alas, again, for its weak narrator, who certainly tried but was betrayed by his high-pitched, overly juvenile voice, nowhere close to the hallucinated prophecies of Barrault, sounding more like a teenager pretending, almost comically at times – not in a good way. Terribly frustrating.
To complete the discographic survey, in 2007 the situation was significantly changed again, when the Canadian label West Hill Radio Archives issued a compilation of hitherto unpublished broadcast recordings of Munch during his early years at the helm of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, including one of La Danse des Morts, from 1952. It is a great version and almost relegates the studio recording to the status of a mere historical document. First, the composition is given complete. Then the sonics are remarkable, allowing an incredible amount of orchestral details to come out vividly, some even better than in stereo recordings from four decades later. Finally, it is a great performance. The American narrator Arnold Moss may not quite have the dramatic impact of Barrault, but he is good enough and his French accent is more than acceptable. Gérard Souzay substitutes for Panzéra and he is not as good, the voice is dryer, but still he is quite acceptable. Soprano Mariquita Moll sings with touching purity and, she too, a fine French accent. Munch has matured, he is less constantly high-strung and more flexible, but then he also generates breathtaking violence in the orchestral and choral explosions of the short conclusive movmenet, “Affirmation”, to make everybody else, including himself in 1941, sound tame in comparison. Any recording must now be gauged against Munch’s two, the first one for the insurpassable Barrault and for Panzéra and the live one for all the rest.
The respective merits of this one, led by Edmon Colomer, and Corboz’ recording are evenly shared. Orchestral details can be heard with marginally more vividness with Colomer, especially the woodwinds and percussions. On the other hand the trumpets don’t register too well, especially detrimental when the one intoning the Dies Irae doesn’t come out prominently enough in the Danse of the Dead itself, track 1 at 2:51, covered by the dense orchestral and choral textures, and you could easily miss it if you don’t know that it’s there. In the Lamento Baritone Herbert Claessens is excellent, with a plump voice to make you almost forget Munch’s Charles Panzéra, and you really need to be French and listen carefully to perceive that he is Flemish and that French is probably not his native language. Corboz’ Gilles Cachemaille was OK, but not as fine as Claessens I find. But Vachey’s Michel Piquemal, on the previous Calliope recording, was also great. On the other hand Colomer’s soprano Anne-Sophie Schmidt in “Espérance dans la Croix” (Hope in the Cross), track 7, isn’t as pure-sounding and touching as Corboz’ Nabuko Okada or Munch’s (in Boston) Mariquita Moll (the two ladies were also the relative letdown of Vachey’s version). The Colomer-Calliope recording, we are told, was made in the Cathedral of Soissons, and you can sense the resonance, but the sound engineers have remarkably kept it in check, and it doesn’t drown the orchestra and chorus. Still, it prevents Colomer from generating the same explosive bite as Munch, especially at the beginning of the last movement – but neither does Corboz. In that respect, Vachey remains the best modern version.
But if merits are shared between Colomer and Corboz, demerits are common: narrator Lambert Wilson is infuriatingly matter-of-fact, he could be describing the meal in his plate or telling of his last summer vacation, rather than vociferating in awe before the dried-up bones on the surface of the earth, he too comes nowhere near the hallucinated incantations of Barrault. I don’t know, this must be prophesizing after Vatican II. I recall that it had more beef and sweep and tempestuousness in the time of Moses. Heck, Wilson wouldn’t stir a ripple in his washbasin, so don’t even dream of dividing the waters of the red sea…
Wilson is an estimable French actor, and he’s also a trained singer. I’m sure he heard the Munch-Barrault recording, and I can only surmise that he tought, “I can’t just imitate, I have to do something different”. Fine, but the problem is, that his “different” doesn’t work, it is weak. Opportunity lost and continued frustration. Vachey’s narrator, Jean Davy, is also a bit matter-of-fact, especially at the beginning, but the voice is timbrally great, imposing and authoritative, making it easy to imagine him standing in the pulpit, and later on in the piece he does rise to the occasion.
Listeners seriously interested in Honegger’s La Danse des Morts should not miss Barrault and not miss Munch live in 1952. [A post-script from August 2024: I’ve just heard the unexpected version from artistic forces from Hamburg Germany hitherto unknown to me, on Troubadisc TRO-CD 01441, paired with Frank Martin’s Requiem, a live recording from 2010 released in 2012. Like Corboz and Colomer, despite its many fine sonics and interpretive assets, it fails on a totally inadequate narrator, more evocative of Captain Kangaroo than of a mythical Hebrew prophet.]
So Vachey remains the best modern version, and a good one too if not entirely ideal. Its fillers are also fine, a great reading – expansive, lush, sultry – of Pastorale d’été and the rare Nocturne from 1936, but they make for a stingy TT of less than 50 minutes. Not a disincentive to me.
Pairing may also be a factor of choice. Colomer-Calliope offers Milhaud’s L’Homme et son désir, another collaboration with Paul Claudel, dating from 1917 – Milhaud was then Claudel’s secretary in the latter’s function as Ambassador in Brazil, and he had already written the incidental music to Claudel’s Agamemnon (1913-14) and Choéphores (1913-15 – that’s the Electra-Orestes story) after Aeschylus, of which the third pendant, Les Euménides, was completed only in 1924. However, you won’t hear a line of Claudel: the writer only sketched the argument for what was meant to be a chamber-ballet written for Nijinsky, on tour in Brazil with the Ballets Russes, but whose mental illness prevented him from performing it. “Chamber”-ballet in that the scoring calls for a chamber orchestra comprised of 20 instrumental players, divided in five different groups meant to be disposed on different planes (hence the ballet’s subtitle “plastic poem”), to which Milhaud applies his typical polytonal and polyrhythmic processes. The lineup was originally four singers (singing wordless vocalises), oboe-trumpet-harp and double-bass, flutes-clarinets, four percussionists and string quartet, here Colomer plays a rearrangement from 1923, where the spatial separation isn’t specified although the grouping in five sections is preserved, and in which the four voices are replaced by trumpet-English horn-French horn and bassoon. I don’t often like the music of Milhaud – as often with the music of Strauss I sense in it a kind of contrived joy that I find very artificial, and I find Poulenc’s humor much more authentic; also, Milhaud’s polytonality can be very grating – but I’ve enjoyed L’Homme et son Désir, a fine example of Milhaud’s early modernism and in which the sultry Brazilian atmospheres that also inspired La Création du Monde can be heard.
Colomer’s approach is startlingly different from the composer’s own from circa 1968 (on VoxBox CDX 5109, barcode 047163510922, with Milhaud’s 6 Little Symphonies, Boeuf sur le toit and other pieces) or the very similar one of Maurice Abravanel recorded cira 1965 (CD-reissued with Milhaud’s Choral Symphony Pacem in terris in 1992 on Vanguard 08 9070 71 European edition or OVC 8067 North-American edition 1993, see my review): considerably slower, less playful, more laid-back to languid, even dreamy in some passages. If would be easy to take exception with it, but in fact I don’t find it entirely ill-suited to the composition. After all this is about “Man and his Desire”. Milhaud’s youthful and manly desires in Brazil in 1917 may have been payful and boisterous, but it is permissible to take a more sultry and languid view of manly desire in the Amazonias. That said, the substitution of the four voices by acoustic instruments deprives the composition of some of its unique originality. Furthermore, the liner notes mention that Colomer has only two percussionists play Milhaud’s part, and although I don’t have the score, I can hear that it entailed some simplification in Milhaud’s percussion part and its polyrhythms, and even in the whistling that should have happened at 6:55 and is here replaced by much more trite flutes. In fact, without the scores I don’t know how much re-writing the 1921 score implied, but apparently considerably more than just a substitution of instruments, and what in the original work is a passage for percussion alone (including various whistles) of extraordinary excitement (especially in Abravanel’s recording), making Varèse’s Ionisations sound almost tame, becomes with Colomer (and in his interpretation), between 6:47 and 8:14, a dreamy moment for instruments and very little percussion (although it progressively accelerates, as a dream turned into a nightmare). Colomer’s version is atmospheric in its own way but generates none of the excitement of Abravanel’s or Milhaud’s. The 1960s sonics of both Abravanel and Milhaud also afford considerably more instrumental vividness and pungency than Colomer’s. If it is “L’Homme et son Désir” you are chiefly interested in, you shouldn’t start with this version, but go to either Milhaud’s or Abravanel’s, for the original conception and a more exciting realization.
And to those considerations add that, between Honegger’s huge choral piece and Milhaud’s small chamber-ballet, there isn’t much stylistic coherence, and in terms of coherence the pairing of Honegger’s Christmas Cantata advantages Corboz – and it is a good version too. Calliope’s TT is a short 49 minutes – they seem to have a pattern with stingy timings – but at 54 minutes Corboz-Erato are hardly more generous. Finally, there is another consideration that is likely to tip the scale in favor of Erato: it is the only release whose booklet provides not only Claudel’s original text, but also an English translation. Calliope-Colomer and Calliope-Vachey have only the French text. Not a decisive factor for me since I have the score, but for anyone else, I do think it is essential to be able to follow what is being narrated and sung.
But against all that there is Corboz’ laughable narrator… But who knows, other listeners might not react as negatively as I do. Corboz’ Christmas Cantata is a good reading but there are even better ones, and his narrator in Danse des Morts is really too impossible. Colomer’s Lambert Wilson isn’t as bad, I guess, but the pairing isn’t so great. If you can’t find the Vachey at a reasonable price, it can be purchased on download.