Pierre Bernac News
French singer (1899-1979)
- baritone
- France
- opera singer
Last update
2024-03-24
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The Boston Musical Intelligencer
2024-01-06 21:26:14
“No Choice but Love: Songs of the LGBTQ+ Community”
[…] (first performed four years later). From Falla, we get two eerily placid yet intense songs in Spanish. From Valverde, two songs in Danish to poems by Tove Ditlevsen. The first is particularly entrancing, much like a Schumann song but with subtly updated harmonic touches. Poulenc’s cycle of nine brief songs, Tel jour, telle nuit, ends CD 1, appropriately, because this is the work, composed of course for Poulenc’s friend and main vocal interpreter, baritone Pierre Bernac, that resulted after some of the squabbling and advice portrayed (or imagined) in Jake Heggie’s humorous and touching work, which directly precedes it here: Friendly Persuasions. Heggie’s four songs evoke imagined but plausibly characteristic interactions between the composer Poulenc and four of his friends and colleagues, including harpsichordist Wanda Landowska and, in the second song, Bernac. [caption id="attachment_57319" align="alignright" width="524"] Eric Ferring (Gillian Riesen photo)[/caption] All in all, No Choice but Love is one […]
2022-05-11 06:36:37
Samuel Barber: The Complete Songs, Dylan Perez & friends survey nearly 50 years of the composer's songs including those unpublished during his lifetime
[…] the admirable booklet fails to print the texts. Fleur Barron provides warmly engaging tone, though her diction can be somewhat occluded. Nuovoletta from 1947 returns us to James Joyce with a complete passage from Finnegans Wake. Despite the apparent denseness of the text, Sorayi Mafi brings style and deft charm to the piece. Mélodies passagères, Op. 51 from 1950-51 sets five French poems by Rainer Maria Rilke (who wrote a surprising amount French poetry). There were written for Pierre Bernac and Francis Poulenc, who were so enthusiastic about them that they recorded them. Here they are sung by Louise Kemeny with warm, lyric tone, yet I remain intrigued as to what Bernac's far drier delivery would have sounded like. What one notices is the highly decorative nature of the piano part and whilst they might not be mistaken for French song, clearly Barber was breathing French air when he wrote them. With Hermit Songs, Op. 53 we […]
2021-04-18 12:51:44
The outstanding Dutch soprano, Elly Ameling, studied in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. She completed her training with Pierre Bernac in Paris. In 1956 she won the first prize in a vocal competition, but her career really started to take off after she won first prize at the ‘Concours International de Musique’ in Geneva in 1958. Elly Ameling made her formal recital debut in Amsterdam in 1961. Subsequent appearances with the Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam, the Amsterdam Philharmonic and the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra secured her reputation. Since then, concert tours led her regularly throughout the world. Elly Ameling’s repertoire (Lieder, as well
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Faces of classical music
2020-08-13 03:08:00
Francis Poulenc's Drunken Angels
[…] Graham Johnson is a veteran British pianist and accompanist who has made himself indispensable to the art of the song. His most significant achievement is a forty-disk recorded survey, with more than sixty singers, of Schubert's complete Lieder, for the Hyperion label. He has also published a Schubert-song companion, which runs to three thousand pages. Johnson's devotion to Poulenc is scarcely less intense. In the nineteen-seventies, he worked closely with the French baritone Pierre Bernac, Poulenc's favorite collaborator, and acquired an encyclopedic knowledge not only of the songs but also of the milieu from which they sprang. In 2013, Hyperion released Johnson's complete survey of the Poulenc songs. His new Poulenc book is a greatly expanded version of the already lavish and lively program notes that accompanied the recordings.Johnson is convinced that Poulenc was not only the premier French songwriter of his time – a claim that few would […]
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