**Walloon Folk Songs.** / Jules Bastin, bass; François Prume Choir, Raymond Micha, director and piano; La Petite Orchestre / François Duysinx. / Pavane Records ADW 7380. Recorded Abbaye de Stavelot, 1971 & 1977. CD, 73:30.
You could walk right past this disc in a shop—assuming you still have shops that sell such things—and never know what you’d missed. The packaging tells you almost nothing useful, the language on the back isn’t quite anything you recognize, and unless you happened to catch Jules Bastin as Ochs at Covent Garden in the late 1970s or know his work from those Colin Davis Berlioz recordings, the name might not ring bells.
That would be your loss.
This is folk music from Wallonia, that French-speaking southern slice of Belgium where the language—Walloon, not quite French, definitely not Flemish—has been fading for generations. Bastin made these recordings as a kind of homage to his parents, to a vanishing culture. The repertoire wanders: Christmas carols, songs from France and Germany, and Ireland, all sung in this dying tongue. It shouldn’t work as well as it does.
But Bastin’s voice. That lean, focused bass—never bloated, never pushing for effect. He took the song prize at Brussels Conservatory in 1958, the opera prize the following year, and by the early seventies had established himself internationally. You hear why immediately. The opening track, an arrangement of Adam’s “Minuit, Chrétien” (we know it as “O Holy Night”), sets the standard: perfect pitch, immaculate diction, and that rare ability to lighten the tone without losing color or expressive weight. The phrasing is eloquent—he knew where a phrase needed to breathe, where to let a word sit in the air just a moment longer.
The disc itself, made at the Abbaye de Stavelot, has that slightly resonant quality you get in stone spaces—airy, unconstricted. Sometimes the François Prume Choir gets caught a bit harshly by the microphones, but Bastin’s voice sits beautifully in the acoustic. He never forces, never barks. There’s a naturalness to his singing that makes you forget you’re listening to folk arrangements and remember you’re hearing stories, memories, a world that was already slipping away when he made these sessions.
I keep thinking of Bastin on those Erato recordings—the appealing Alfonso in Così fan tutte with Te Kanawa and von Stade, or as Bartolo in Karajan’s second Nozze di Figaro. Always the second bass, the character role: Leone to Raimondi’s Attila, the First Nazarene while van Dam sang Jokanaan. He was a superb artist who never quite got the star treatment, though Karajan clearly valued him. His Mephisto in the Davis Damnation de Faust has real bite and wit.
This disc—recorded when Bastin was at his vocal peak—captures something you don’t often get on record: a great singer simply making music, no ego, no striving for effect. Just songs, sung with perfect artistry and deep affection. The notes are in French only, which seems right somehow.
You won’t find this in most collections. You should. At a very modest price, this is a document of real value—not just for Bastin admirers, though they’ll want it immediately, but for anyone who cares about singing as an art rather than a blood sport. Thoroughly recommended, with the caveat that you’ll need to hunt for it. Worth the effort.
