A fresh and uninhibited triumph
Ensemble Aedes’s gutsy performance goes straight to the heart of Figure humaine
Mathieu Romano (conductor)
Ensemble Aedes
Aparté AP 201
Figure humaine makes enormous demands on the stamina, technique and musicianship of any choir, which may explain why it’s performed less often than Poulenc’s Gloria or Stabat mater. Of the dozen-plus recordings currently available, the majority feature nearer 40 rather than the 200 singers Poulenc envisaged. Two French choirs and two British choirs stand out for their impressive technique and emotional impact, and of the four, Ensemble Aedes, directed by Mathieu Romano, go straight to the heart with their gutsy performance. The young French soloists do for choral works what the Il Giardino Armonico ensemble did for instrumental classics – namely, deliver them with fresh, uninhibited tone. They may be raw and approximate at times, but Poulenc wanted citizens on the barricades, not choristers.
The opening bars are crucial – the basses’ entrance must strike fear, or at the very least apprehension, into the heart. Their grumbling ‘De tous les printemps du monde’ recalls the dull thud of shells landing on the earth, and the venom of
‘le plus laid’, Poulenc’s ugliest dissonance sung with increasing emphasis by the choir, sends shivers down the spine. By contrast the second song, ‘En chantant les servantes s'élancent’, with its mocking la-la-la-la underlay, is jaunty, crisp and clear. When the two choirs come together they make Poulenc’s polyphony blaze, never more so than in the seventh poem, ‘La menace sous le ciel rouge’, when the pianissimo passage builds into a fortissimo for both choirs on ‘des hommes indestructibles’ – ‘men will forever be immortal’. Romano doesn’t deliver the extreme tempo markings Poulenc suggests for the eighth movement, ‘Liberté’, but the changes of texture are heard quite clearly as phrases are passed between the two choirs or narrowed down to individual parts.
The French sopranos have a warm, mezzo-like roundness even when they’re floating their top notes, unlike the whiter-toned sopranos of Tenebrae. The fiendishly high E that ends the piece on the longed-for word ‘liberté’ is a test for every choir, and here two brave sopranos top the chord with a golden sheen rather than a piercing blow. These bright voices respond instinctively to the colours in the text and the emotional impact of their final ffff phrase is overwhelming. The recording, made in RIFFX Studios near Paris in May 2018, emphasizes the ebb and flow of the two choirs and the text is crystal clear.