 Brillante par son éclectisme, la musique du maître américain Virgil Thomson est à la fois indépendante et traditionnelle, moderne et classique, hors de tout système et toujours très expressive. Cet enregistrement qui a demandé deux ans de travail en apporte la démonstration. En plus de trois heures d’écoute, nous découvrons l’univers musico-poétique de Thomson allant de textes anonymes médiévaux à la poésie contemporaine. Pour l’anglais, Thomson privilégie William Blake et Shakespeare, son amie Gertrude Stein et son contemporain Kenneth Koch. Mais pour l’auditeur francophone peut familier de la langue anglaise (absence de traduction), ce sont les poèmes en français qui retiennent plus l’attention. Élève de Nadia Boulanger, influencé par Érik Satie et Parisien d’adoption pendant de nombreuses années, Thomson ose mettre en musique Racine (grande tirade de Phèdre), Bossuet (Oraison funèbre de Henriette-Marie de France), La Fontaine (Le Singe et le Léopard), le poète surréaliste Georges Hugnet (étonnant Berceau de Gertrude ou Le Mystère de la rue Fleurus), et même le marquis de Sade. Découverte totale d’un grand mélodiste mis à l’honneur par des artistes dont on loue la parfaite diction et l’impeccable interprétation. (Gérard Martin) These discs offer the most complete recorded collection of works for voice and piano of Virgil Thomson (1896–1989), one of the most important American composers of the twentieth century. Thomson wrote songs throughout his career and they offer a unique window into his changing musical concerns and his compositional evolution. Since this recording includes works previously unpublished and unrecorded, several of which are substantial in themselves and important to his development as a composer, it makes possible a more complete understanding of his work. Among the major rediscoveries is the grandly expressive and beautiful Oraison Funèbre, which, without sounding like it at all, evokes Satie’s Socrate. Thomson wrote that the great song composers—Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wolf, Mahler, Faure, Debussy, Duparc, Ravel, and Poulenc—accomplished their miracles through their ability to make the music “not only of equal quality with the verse but also its mate. It gets inside a poem and stays there, intertwined unforgettably, never to be thought of henceforth as not a part of the whole idea.” He contrasted these works with the songs of Purcell, which he thought, although very beautiful and expertly done, nonetheless did not fuse the music and text—the music was merely “decorative.” Thomson’s songs run the gamut of his classification. If one sets out to set words to music in a way that deliberately avoids interpreting or illustrating them, one probably sets up a situation where the music and words are separable. So the early Stein settings, the Shakespeare Songs, and the Old English Songs may (or may not) be very beautifully and elegantly decorative, but it is difficult not to think of the music of Mostly About Love or Praises and Prayers, or the Blake Songs as anything other than an inseparable part of the whole. There the music gets right inside of the words, and right inside of us.
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