Métamorphoses: Poulenc on Violin and Piano. Hongyi Mo, violin; John Etsell, piano. Azica Records ACD-71382. Total time: 53:18.
DIGITAL REVIEW — The idea behind Métamorphoses, the new Poulenc album by violinist Hongyi Mo and pianist John Etsell, is simple: to underscore the literary sources behind music through purely instrumental means. Métamorphoses presents a collection of 10 arrangements and two sonatas by a composer whose music can sometimes soar with unabashed tunefulness.
If you can’t quite put your finger on what makes his songs so timelessly appealing, listen to Mo’s transcription of “Les chemins de l’amour” (“The ways of love”). Though it’s just one of the 150-odd songs Poulenc composed, you can recognize how distinctively he captures the essence of the French song during World War II. You might even nod with a knowing smile, as if being reminded of something you’ve known all along but failed to pay attention to.
Can the quintessential art of Poulenc’s songs be captured instrumentally, without the words of Jean Anouilh (the poet of “Les chemins de l’amour”), Guillaume Apollinaire, Louis Aragon, and Louise de Vilmorin?
It might depend on your affinity for the French language and its exquisitely accented phonemes, but Mo and Etsell — a violinist in the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and a staff pianist for Detroit Opera, respectively — persuasively argue that yes, it can. The music is performed here with candor and warmth; the duo revels in the musical intimacy that chamber music as fine as Poulenc’s provides.
Mo plays with a honeyed tone, smoothly gliding over the beat. His phrasing is organic, free of frills. He succeeds in adding subtle variety to repeated notes, especially when the setting of the text to music is syllabic, as in “Queen of seagulls,” for which Mo uses a gently detached articulation to imitate the voice in the original song (usually a soprano). In slower songs, like “That is how you are,” or the sadly yearning “Hotel,” Mo projects languishing — but not languid — tones that conjure the intimacy and vulnerability of half-spoken confessions.
Despite the literary aspect, however, most of the songs feel rather like delicacies to set the mood for the Sonata for Violin and Piano (1942–43; revised 1949) and, to a lesser degree, the arrangement for violin and piano of the Sonata for Oboe and Piano (1962). The violin sonata, the heart of the album, transforms tense episodes of freneticism into exuberant lyricism, with a harmonic language that Mo accurately characterizes in his liner notes as “alternately warm and grotesque.” Poised, exuding self-assurance, and with clean pizzicato, Mo elegantly demarcates the transitions into the contrasting sections, heaving and undulating around the beat in close connection with Etsell. In the second-movement Intermezzo, they gradually mold Poulenc’s long but shapely melodies. Mo’s vibrato is subtle, never overdone.
The upbeat finale takes a turn for the exciting; you can hear Mo take a sharp breath to signal the fast tempo at the very beginning, an instant before he locks in with Etsell and takes off into Poulenc’s high-flying runs and billowing melodies. Throughout, Mo demonstrates contrasting sonorities as he attacks the strings with varying degrees of pressure and perky, yet precise, pizzicatos. It is a great performance of a revealing chamber piece.
Like the songs, the two sonatas are captured in crisp audio that faithfully replicates the live interaction between the two performers, with production and engineering by the estimable Alan Bise.
