With the new recording of La voix humaine by Francoise Pollet still fresh in the memory, a return to the original of 1959 is like a real-life face-to-face meeting after a dreamy period of reminiscence. Here the aural vividness is so sufficient, the identification of the singer so complete, that one never feels a need to see the changing expressions of the face or the oppression of the room's silent darkening. Denise Duval, for whom the role was written, is incomparably sure in her feeling for the idiom, and Pretre, conductor of the premiere, is a strong ally, never over-indulgent in the sickly-sweet torments of memory and desire, but keeping the piece moving and rightly tense. The original recording, which first came out on RCA Victor in America, took full advantage of the then recent advent of stereo, so that the singer carries the telephone across from (perhaps) table to bed, in a way that might now be found a disconcerting or too self-conscious feature of production; but I have no quarrel with it myself and welcome, particularly here, the immediacy of the voice. The sound is now brighter and clearer; a pity, though, that quite a large number of pre-echoes remain.
In his review of the first issue, Andrew Porter, recalling an earlier record of Cocteau's play, argued that it didn't need music, ''and it does need a wider range of timbres, inflexions and nuances than a soprano who must also think about pitch and tone-production can hope to achieve''. As if in illustration of his point, the Poulenc opera is coupled on this disc with another Cocteau monologue-play, but this time in its original form. Le bel indifferent was a tour de force for Edith Piaf, and the recording magnificently catches her in all her moods, sardonic, murderous or tearful. It also has the sound effects and, presumably, the timing of the stage performances given in 1953 after the Marigny Theatre revival, 13 years after its premiere. Yet I don't find that it supports the suggestion that in La voix humaine the musical setting is something of a liability: both pieces are vivid in the imagination, but Le bel indifferent is observed, while La voix humaine is seen and at the same time experienced, through the music, as though from within.
EMI may be congratulated on the issue; not, however, on its presentation, which is quite inadequate. In both pieces it is essential that the listener should be able to understand the French text. No printed texts are given, and the 360-word essay (shorter than this review) summarizes each in no more than three or four sentences. And if it assumed that the listener knows French well enough to follow the sung and spoken words, why take up half of the meagre booklet with a translation of the meagre French essay?'