Proms Chamber Music 5 (23.08.20) Susan Graham & Malcolm Martineau - French song

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

In today's chamber music concert given in Cadogan Hall in 2009, American mezzo-soprano Susan Graham performs repertoire close to her heart with pianist Malcolm Martineau: a sampler of 19th- and 20th-century French song.

Bizet: Chanson d'avril
Franck: Nocturne
Chabrier: Les cigales
Bachelet: Chere nuit
Duparc: Au pays ou se fait la guerre
Ravel: La paon
Caplet: Le corbeau et le renard
Roussel: Reponse d'une epouse sage
Debussy: Colloque sentimental
Honegger: Three Songs from 'The Little Mermaid'
Rosenthal: La souris d'Angleterre
Poulenc: La Dame de Monte Carlo

(From the BBC Proms, 27 July 2009)

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I could be wrong about this, but I think this concert has been moved forward by a week.

[bluestateprommer]

I could be wrong about this, but I think this concert has been moved forward by a week.

Indeed, yes, as this concert looks to have been switched with the Elias String Quartet / Julian Bliss PCM. But back to the main event: this looks like a very nice song recital, quite diverse and not all the usual suspects. Plus, it makes for a nice b-day salute both to SG and MM, as each of them turns 60 this year. In fact, from a check of her wikipedia article, July 23 was her birthday. So the re-scheduling just misses the date by one month. (MM's b-day was February 3.)

[bluestateprommer]

Another late-in-the-day catch-up listen of past PCM's, the 2009 edition of "The Graham and Martineau Show", a very, very well programmed and diverse French-language song recital (one Belgian in the mix included, in fairness). One nice feature of this recital is that it featured both SG and MM in conversation with Louise Fryer, to emphasize that this is a true collaboration between artists of equal stature and not just a singer's showcase, with the pianist related to the background. The only quibble was that the encore after Poulenc's "La dame de Monte-Carlo" was snipped from this re-broadcast, presumably in order to fit the whole program within 1 hour.

I've seen once SG and MM together live in recital in the past few years, and it was clear from that recital that they have a great working relationship. That chemistry showed up in this 2009 recital as well, where SG mentioned that she'd been working with MM for 10 years at the time.