French Violin Works – Michaël Seigle

Reynaldo Hahn belonged to a Paris that vanished long before he did — the salons of the Comtesse Greffulhe, the world Proust mythologized and Hahn actually lived in as Proust’s lover and lifelong friend. His music remembers that world the way an old man remembers his youth: fondly, selectively, with the rough edges sanded off. The Violin Sonata in C major, composed in 1926 when Poulenc and Les Six were busy épater-ing anyone still listening, sounds instead like a lovely anachronism, all Fauréan sunlight and gentle nostalgia. It asks a great deal of its performers precisely because it demands so little in the way of pyrotechnics. You cannot fake your way through Hahn. You either feel the tug of that bygone tenderness or you don’t.

Michaël Seigle, alas, mostly doesn’t. Or if he does, his violin refuses to say so. The tone throughout this new disc runs thin and wiry, especially in upper positions where Hahn wants creaminess, a kind of vocal warmth — he was, after all, a celebrated song composer and sometime singer himself. There’s a wanness to the phrasing in the sonata’s opening Andante that left me cold rather than wistful. Augustin Voegele’s piano, to his credit, tries to compensate. His voicing has shape, his rubato breathes. But a sonata is a conversation, and here one partner keeps changing the subject.

The little Romance in A major suffers worse. Barely five minutes of unabashed salon charm, it wants unhurried tenderness, not the near-minute-longer trudge Seigle and Voegele give it here. Compare Charles Stewart’s account for Hyperion, with Stephen Coombs at the piano: over four minutes of pure ardency, phrased as though he actually believed in the sentiment rather than merely observing it from a discreet distance. That earlier disc remains, for me, the touchstone for this repertoire. Nothing on the new disc unseats it.

Things improve considerably once the players leave Hahn’s drawing room behind. Ravel’s Tzigane, that dazzling and slightly cruel showpiece written for Jelly d’Arányi, suits Seigle’s wiriness rather better. The astringency that undermined the Hahn here reads as gypsy fire, or something close to it. The glissandi snap, the harmonics in the opening cadenza ring true without strain, and Voegele’s contribution — stylish, even flamboyant in the czardas rhythms — finally sounds like a true partnership rather than damage control.

Chausson’s Poème, that gorgeous fifteen-minute distillation of Turgenev’s tale of a magic violin and a love triangle gone fatally wrong, fares best of all. Chausson wasn’t interested in narrating the plot, the stabbing, the jealous husband, so much as distilling its emotional residue: longing, enchantment, loss. The isolated piano chords that open the piece, cold and spaced like breath in winter air, give way to shimmering anticipatory ripples before the violin enters with that magnificent melody, and here Seigle finally locates real ardor. The double-stops in the climactic pages have weight and grain. Voegele’s rippling figurations underneath never overwhelm. It’s the most persuasive interpretation on the disc, more urgent and more committed than anything in the Hahn.

Graciane Finzi — Casablanca-born in 1945, no relation to Gerald despite the surname — contributes Et si tout recommençait, a work I didn’t know before this disc and found intriguingly astringent. Its title’s wistful conditional, “and if it all began again,” is answered by music that seems unconvinced anything ever really does. Jolivet’s brief “Incantation,” subtitled for the image of Agni becoming a symbol, closes the program with ritualistic intensity: three minutes of modal murmuring that Seigle dispatches with more conviction than he brought to Hahn’s parlor charms.

An uneven disc, then, generous in its unusual programming but inconsistent in execution. Anyone wanting the Chausson or the Ravel need not hesitate. For the Hahn, and Hahn deserves better than he usually gets, seek out Stewart and Coombs instead, and let this new pairing serve mainly for its more adventurous corners.