Pierre Bernac, reportedly, described the songs of Jacques Leguerney (b. 1906) as ''melodies de pianiste'', and one can see why: their keyboard writing is often very dramatic, passionately turbulent in a rather un-French, un-reticent way; it is sometimes closer to Brahms than to any of the expected French models and, yes, once or twice the accompaniment does almost overwhelm the vocal line or threaten to render it superfluous. One might expect such an unprolific composer (apart from 60 or so songs his entire published output consists of two ballet scores and a choral psalm setting) and one so ready to abandon composition entirely (he has done so twice: during much of the 1930s for family and business reasons, since the late 1960s out of bitter disappointment that a commissioned score never reached performance) to be a miniaturist, but the reverse is more often the case.
Several of the most striking songs here are those which use bold and arresting gestures to express strong emotions: Ronsard's Epipalinodie, for instance, where the poet's protest at the destroying torture of love is matched by a leaping, urgent vocal line and by stormy passion in the piano, or the same poet's achingly heartfelt threnody for his dead mistress, Je me lamente, where the mounting eloquence of the sober phrases reaches its climax only in the final verse when her name is at last uttered.
The poems that Leguerney chooses are often rich in an imagery that only declares its purpose in the closing lines. Thus Etienne Jodelle's Comme un qui s'est perdu evokes pathless forests, storm-tossed seas and the impenetrable blackness of a moonless night as emblems of separation from the loved one, but ''on seeing once more your blessed light, I forget forest and suffering and the long, black stormy night''; Leguerney's setting seizes all the opportunities offered for almost flamboyant pictorialism, but skilfully maintains its impulse through to the tellingly expressed conclusion.
There are quieter pleasures as well: the use of downward arpeggios to evoke Orpheus's lyre and the wordless conclusion of Plaintes d'Orph1ee, the beautiful responsiveness to Philippe Desportes's slumbrous word-music in Au sommeil, the striking evocations of glinting water and of solemn woodland shadows in La source and A la foret. And there are a few failures, to be sure, where the imaginative piano writing becomes crabbed or the vocal line seems disappointingly colourless, but there are enough songs fo real quality here to confirm that Leguerney is a composer well worth discovering.
He is not easy to perform, alas. Neither of the singers has either the delicacy of touch or the passion that he ideally needs, though Ollmann hints at both qualities occasionally. Bonenfant is squally and not very steady; at times it is as much as she can do to control her voice, and she makes very little of the words. The pianist is good but, like the singers (the soprano especially), is let down by a badly unfocused recording: the voices are close and harsh, sometimes distorting, the piano backward and clangy.
In the circumstances one can only recommend the record to those who can listen through the performances and the recording to the individual imagination that they fitfully reveal and to singers who might be inspired to give us more worthy interpretations.'