Kaufmann: Cantabile and Other Works – Calmel

Names like Serge Kaufmann do not turn up often on record store shelves, and there’s a reason for that: most of his career unfolded behind the scenes at French television, producing the sort of cultural programming that used to exist before everyone decided culture was bad for ratings. So this disc arrives as something like an act of restitution. It insists we listen to Kaufmann the composer, not Kaufmann the impresario, and mostly it makes its case.

The music itself will not startle anyone raised on Boulez or the IRCAM crowd. Kaufmann writes tonal, tensile, deeply felt music that owes more to Honegger’s granite lyricism and to the poised classicism of Frank Martin than to any of the postwar avant-gardes. There is a whiff of Landowski too, that generation of French composers who never quite abandoned the idea that music should mean something to a listener sitting in a hall, not just to a theorist parsing a score. Kaufmann’s harmonic language bends toward dissonance when the emotional temperature demands it, but he never lets astringency curdle into abstraction. This is music with its heart on its sleeve, unembarrassed about it.

Cantabile, the triptych for cello, strings, and harpsichord that opens the program, is the disc’s finest achievement. Three laments, spare in gesture, that treat the solo cello almost as a cantor’s voice keening over a hushed string bed. Philippe Pennanguer plays with a burnished, covered tone, never pushing, letting the melodic line breathe on its own terms. There’s a whisper of Bloch’s Schelomo in the writing, that same rhapsodic Hebraic inflection, but scaled down, interiorized, stripped of Bloch’s opulence. The harpsichord, oddly, does not feel like a modernist affectation here; it adds a dry, ashen color that keeps sentiment from tipping into sentimentality.

Anne Holroyd takes on Le temps déchiré, Kaufmann’s own text mourning his mother, set in a free arioso that occasionally splinters into Sprechgesang, a nod, conscious or not, to Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire lineage, though the emotional world could not be further from Viennese expressionism. Holroyd’s mezzo has grain and weight in the lower register; the top occasionally thins under pressure. But she understands the score’s rhetoric, its need to speak rather than simply sing. This is a scena of grief, plainly, nakedly personal, and she resists the temptation to prettify it.

The Elégie for strings that follows is, structurally, the simplest thing here: a processional, harmonically strained, that Kaufmann himself might have written with Lutosławski’s Musique funèbre open on the piano. The debt is audible but not damning. Where Lutosławski built his tribute to Bartók on strict twelve-tone canon, Kaufmann keeps things looser, more overtly tonal, the dissonances arriving like bruises rather than architecture. It is a short piece, five minutes, maybe six, of unaffected sorrow, and does not overstay its welcome.

Un matin à Varsovie is the ambitious centerpiece, inspired by that unbearable photograph from the Warsaw ghetto, the small boy with hands raised, cap too big for his head. Comparisons to Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw are inevitable and, I think, somewhat unfair to both works. Schoenberg’s piece is a scream; Kaufmann’s is a sigh. The speaker recites the composer’s own text at the opening, the orchestra takes over, and then, in a formal gesture I find genuinely haunting, the narrator returns much later, but only to repeat the poem’s opening words, as though memory itself has stalled, unable to move past the image. It’s a canny structural idea, more Radiohead loop than modernist device, and it works.

Béatrice Barbary, heard in the final two works, brings a bright, slightly steely soprano that suits the more exposed, almost liturgical writing Kaufmann gives her: less Holroyd’s grain, more a clean, chapel-like purity. “Et si un jour” closes the program on a note of guarded consolation, tonal harmonies opening out like a hand unclenching.

Sonically the engineering is close and warm, occasionally too close. You can hear Pennanguer’s bow change direction, hear breath before phrases, which some listeners will treasure and others will find intrusive. No matter. This is repertoire nobody else is releasing, performed with evident conviction by musicians who clearly believe in it. That counts for a great deal. Kaufmann may never displace Honegger or Martin in the standard repertoire, and this disc will not convince anyone that he deserves to. But as a document of one distinctive, humane compositional voice, it earns its place on the shelf, and deserves better than the obscurity that’s so far been its lot.