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Voyage à Paris
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Voyage à Paris is a 70-minute studio album of French art songs performed by Frederica von Stade with Martin Katz's piano accompaniment. It was released in 1995.. Recording The album was recorded digitally in the Manhattan Centre, New York City on 29 and 30 April 1993. Critical reception Reviews Richard T. Fairman reviewed the album in Gramophone in April 1995. The programme included a few valuable rarities, he wrote. Honegger's Petit cours de morale ("A small course in morals") afforded some cross-Channel amusement, as each of its moral ditties was a sketch of a British subject. The three Messiaen songs were the composer's earliest published works for solo voice. The sentimental Pourquoi? sounded like anyone but Messiaen. Von Stade had the measure of both composers' styles. Mélisande's wistfulness and fey vulnerability suited her to perfection, but unfortunately there was rather too much of Mélisande to be heard on this disc. Ravel's Cinq mélodies populaires grecques, in particular, demanded more rhythmic life. In Debussy's C'est l'extase languoreuse, there was languorous ecstasy to spare; the tempo was slowish and the portamentos drooped wiltingly. It was a good thing that there was more pointed Poulenc and Satie alongside. The voice was as delicately coloured in the middle register as ever, though some strain had started to creep in at the top. Katz might with profit have indulged his singer less. An interesting programme, none the less. Jamie James reviewed the album in Stereo Review in September 1995. Frederica von Stade had long made a speciality of early twentieth-century French art songs, he wrote, and she brought her usual verve and charm to bear upon the ones in this generous collection. Her voice sounded whitish and thin at moments of stress, however, and she was just a touch heavy-handed with feathery-fine trifles such as Satie's Trois Mélodies and the Poulenc miniatures that she had selected. Martin Katz gave her expert support on the piano, and the recorded sound had a pleasing resonance. David Shengold wrote about the album in Opera News in 2016. "Voyage à Paris ... finds von Stade with ... autumnal tone, but the legato flows freely in the contemplative, handsomely turned mélodies by Satie, Poulenc, Honegger, Messiaen and others." Also in 2016, David Patrick Stearns revisited the album in Gramophone. The ambitious Voyage à Paris recital, he wrote, showed Poulenc and Messiaen as having common word-painting priorities, partly because von Stade called attention more to the music then to herself. And because her vocal technique was so much from the neck down, you never saw (and rarely heard) the work that went into her singing. CD track listing. In 2016, Sony reissued the album on CD with a 52-page booklet in their 18-CD collection Frederica von Stade: The Complete Columbia Recital Albums (catalogue number 88875183412). See Also
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