Since she first appeared on the international circuit some 10 years ago, American mezzo Susan Graham has developed a formidable reputation as an interpreter of French music. Listening to her sing Debussy, Poulenc and Messager in recital, you understand why.
French art songs are notoriously tricky, rooted in a combination of textual declamation and lyrical expansion. The balance can swing. Some interpreters aim for verbal emphasis at the expense of line and shape. Others indulge in grand vocal gestures and the words can slip.
Graham, however, weaves style, sense, sound and temperament into a single whole. Both her voice and personality convey a refined sensuality, ideal in music that must be supremely suggestive without ever being blatant.
Dressed in a black belle époque dress with a sapphire choker at her throat, she looks like one of Degas's ambivalently knowing society ladies. Her silky tone hints at veiled decadence rather than open voluptuousness.
The words tell. Poulenc's settings of Apollinaire have a sardonic wit that is never coarse. The heroines of Messager's operettas, whether reminiscing about Lolita-ish adolescence or playing multiple lovers off against each other, reveal Graham to be a mistress of innuendo.
The high point, however, is Debussy's Proses Lyriques, where she balances headiness with restraint. The text, by Debussy himself, has been much derided for its overblown imagery - 'the hothouse of pain,' 'flowering hips' and the like - yet here you never feel for a second that there's a word out of place. The benchmark performance of the work has always been Maggie Teyte's legendary 1940 recording with Gerald Moore. Graham and her pianist Malcolm Martineau more than equal it.
Yet the qualities that Graham brings to French music don't always cohere when transferred to the German repertoire. Berg's Seven Early Songs inhabit a comparable terrain of vague sexuality and Graham, letting her tone expand with Straussian opulence, is unquestionably superb.
Brahms's Zigeunerlieder, however, brought problems in their wake. They're art songs masquerading as folk songs and they need a touch of the gutter if they're to work, neither of which is Graham's style. The rest of the recital was outstanding, however - and I don't expect to hear Debussy sung so well for a very long time.
