Suzie Leblanc, Yannick Nézet-Séguin - Mozart: Lieder (2006)

Is there a subgroup of works among the creations of top composers that has been more neglected than Mozart's songs? They're neglected partly because they're a very mixed bag; they were mostly composed for specific purposes, and they don't develop as a group in an orderly way as do, say, the piano concertos. At any rate, any new recording of Mozart's songs is good to have -- the album title referring to "Lieder" is a bit misleading, for there are songs in French and Italian here as well as German. There are some real masterpieces among the 22 songs included here (out of about three dozen Mozart wrote). Plunge right into Abendempfindung (Evening Emotion), K. 522, for one of the finest of the group, with a flexibility of melodic line that strongly suggests Schubert -- and for an example of the unusual but persuasive approach to the songs employed here by Québec soprano Suzie LeBlanc and fortepianist Yannick Nézet-Séguin. They apparently have concluded that the obstacle to appreciating Mozart's songs is that concert-hall-sized performances overwhelm them. So the performers forcibly downsize the scale to the size of a room. LeBlanc's singing is light and quiet, with very little vibrato, and Nézet-Séguin's fortepiano is pushed way back in the balance to a point where it seems almost a spectral presence. The balance seems strange at first, but hear how well it works on an almost minimal piece like Komm, liebe Zither (Come, dear zither), K 351. And it brings out what annotator Pierre Vachon propounds as a quasi-popular strain of the Mozart-era lied, which was intended for amateurs -- the many innocent-sounding songs like the fairly famous Das Veilchen (The Violet), K. 476, are allowed to reveal their little subtleties. The selection includes some real oddities, like the early An die Freude (To Joy), K. 53 (this is not the Schiller "Ode to Joy," which wasn't written until 1785) and the Masonic voice-and-piano cantata Die ihr des unermeßlichen Weltalls Schöpfer ehrt (You who honor the Creator of the immeasurable universe), K. 619. LeBlanc's singing is an ingratiating delight throughout, completely avoiding the squarish phrasing that Baroque specialists sometimes bring to Mozart. The negatives here are minor: an occasional French-accented German word from LeBlanc, an over-echoic acoustic in the St.-Augustin de Mirabel church -- an often-used venue, but one that was wrong for this intimate project. On the whole, though, this may become the definitive reading of Mozart's songs.