Search - Jean Cocteau, Francis Poulenc, Georges Prêtre :: La Voix Humaine

Disturbing opera, but overall a strange package.

darragh o'donoghue | 03/14/2001

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Anyone expecting a slice of impish whimsey from a Poulenc/Cocteau collaboration should be warned that this 1959 work is deeply harrowing, an unremitting one-act opera monologue, featuring an abandoned lover (sung by Daniele Duval) painfully breaking down over the telephone. the music, which faithfully serves the text, captures every quicksilver emotion of its heroine, from fear to wild hope to despair, with a mixture of spare underpinning and Hollywood lushness. Unfortunately, no libretto is included; unless you have pretty good French, the interplay between music and text will be lost - the music is not self-sufficient enough to enjoy on its own.But at least there is music. 'La Voix Humaine' is followed by another Cocteau monologue about another jilted lover volubly breaking down, this time played by Edith Piaf. this has nothing to do with Poulenc; it is a piece of recorded theatre, with only fragments of background gramophone music to soften the general austerity; Piaf closes her half-hour harangue with a very welcome chanson. Cocteau's simple French and Piaf's clear enunciation are easy enough to follow, but it seems a bizarre filler to offer an English-speaking classical music audience."