"THE COMPLETE RECORDINGS".(Review)

Reynaldo Hahn

[] "THE COMPLETE RECORDINGS" Songs and arias by Hahn, Bizet, Chabrier, Gounod et al.; Hahn, Ragon, Gregory, Ferrant, Endreze, Vallin et al.; Hahn, piano and conducting. No texts. Romophone 82015-2 (Harmonia Mundi, dist.)

This motley retrospective sheds interesting light on Reynaldo Hahn as performer, accompanist and composer. His singing may come as a surprise, since he was considered to have (in soprano Ninon Vallin's words) "a thin thread of a voice." But the primary source of his bad vocal reputation was Hahn himself. Untrained and unwilling to practice, he boasted of not caring enough about singing to remove the cigarette from the corner of his mouth. Casual elegance was the creed, or at least the defense; and in recent years the Hahn cigarette has become more famous than the voice.

Wrongly so, it turns out. Through all the scratches and crackles on the crusty earliest cuts (1909-10), his compact, forward-placed tenor rides easily over one hurdle after another, salvaging from the technological smokescreen not just razor-sharp words but (in Lully, Bizet and Gounod) such vocal niceties as turns and grace notes. A great deal of oxygen must have gotten past that cigarette, to judge from this evidence, since the elegant, uninterrupted phrases sometimes reach astonishing lengths.

True, the scale and size of the tone have very clear limits, so Hahn bottoms out even in the limited range of his "Offrande" and "L'heure exquise," and his work in later decades includes a few mishaps. Historical completeness in this case invites invidious comparison by offering dual takes of a few songs a decade or more apart.

Whatever the technical limitations, though, these Hahn vocals -- in his own as well as others' works -- are highly charged performances, not just finely sculpted where the phrases are concerned but mercurial, seemingly spontaneous and infectious. This has everything to do with his irrepressible charm and wit, but also with the firm grounding of a musician who was also an opera conductor of some repute.

Hahn at the keyboard, whether accompanying himself or others, seemed to think in terms of extended sentences, entire ...