JANUARY 17, 2010 – THE PLAIN DEALER
French countertenor makes beguiling Cleveland debut
by Donald Rosenberg

It is common for Apollo’s Fire, the Cleveland Baroque Orchestra, to invite guest artists to take part in performances. But when has a musician been asked to come to town not to appear with the superlative period-instrument ensemble?

In an unusual move, the orchestra was nowhere to be seen or heard Saturday at the Cleveland Institute of Music’s Mixon Hall. Instead, the stage was occupied by French countertenor Philippe Jaroussky and pianist Jerome Ducros, who gave an elegant and illuminating program of French songs under the auspices of Apollo’s Fire.

As she explained in a program note, music director Jeannette Sorrell became a Jaroussky fan after watching him on the Internet. By coincidence, he also became enamored of Apollo’s Fire online. They struck up a conversation that reaped Jaroussky’s Cleveland recital (two days after giving the same program with Ducros at New York’s Carnegie Hall) and performances with Apollo’s Fire (finally) in 2011.

Saturday’s concert introduced two superb artists to Cleveland. Jaroussky’s countertenor is a thing of silken beauty that he uses with ultra-refined musicality. His voice is capable of caressing phrases, dropping to a hush and soaring on impassioned wings.

Ducros is a wonderful collaborative pianist who can stand on his own. He gave Jaroussky chances to relax by playing solo works on each half: Cecile Chaminade’s “Automne” and Cesar Franck’s Prelude pour piano, both animated by Ducros’ commanding sense of sonority, nuance and expressive contrast.

On this occasion, Chaminade and Franck joined a bevy of Gallic colleagues whose melodies, as French art songs are called, have special qualities of rapture, nostalgia, regret and hallucinatory ecstasy. It’s no wonder that Jaroussky and Ducros titled their program “Opium,” after Camille Saint-Saens’ “Delirium (Dream of Opium).”

To all of these works, Jaroussky applied the subtlest of vocal gestures, making sure the texts motivated the musical decisions. Hearing a countertenor not in the Baroque or contemporary repertoire for which the voice is most noted resulted in a new awareness of the inventive beauty of these melodies.

Jaroussky was especially tender in Reynaldo Hahn’s “To Chloris,” whose stately splendor unfolded from a voice that added warmth to the vibrato whenever the words suggested pinches of intensity. The mournful utterances in Ernest Chausson’s “The Hours” likewise received haunting delineation in Jaroussky’s multi-hued performance.

Along with bountiful melancholy, the program contained moments of seductive brilliance, such as Jules Massenet’s insinuating “A Night in Spain” and Chaminade’s “Sombrero,” a fleet tale of amorous intrigue that Jaroussky repeated as an encore, this time switching amusingly between countertenor and baritone.

The other encore was Pauline Viardot’s “Havanaise,” which is full of lyrical and coloratura flourishes. Is Jaroussky likely to provide more such grand artistic displays when he returns in 2011 to team with Apollo’s Fire? Mais oui.