Les Chemins d'amour (Francis Poulenc - Claude Debussy - Henri Duparc)

Album review

The songs of Henri Duparc, Claude Debussy, and Francis Poulenc are stylistically dissimilar, as far as they are products of temperamentally different composers and their respective times. Duparc, the most unabashedly Romantic, composed the earliest versions of his chansons between 1864 and 1884. Debussy, despite his more innovative sense of tone color and harmony, shares much of Duparc's fin de siècle ethos, since he wrote his chansons between 1880 and 1903. Poulenc, on the other hand, composed his songs decades later, and though his sets from the 1930s to the early '60s reflect emotions as sweet and sentimental as Debussy's or Duparc's, his music is more whimsical and often more ironic in outlook. So the unifying theme of this album seems to be the subject matter of the songs, the love lyrics en français by such fine poets as Baudelaire, Gautier, and Verlaine, and other less talented versifiers. Les Chemins d'Amour is a musical valentine to the most distinguished writers of French love poetry and chansons, and the attractive interpretations by soprano Olga Pasiecznik and pianist Ewa Poblocka emphasize the tenderness and longueur that these songs commonly express. The sound quality is good on the whole, though slightly muffled in the accompaniment.
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