Hahn Venezia

 Day 54

Hahn Venezia

Anthony Rolfe Johnson

Graham Johnson

I have great affection for the songs of Reynaldo Hahn. They sit on the boundaries between mélodie and popular song and have all of the best features of both. Perhaps you should avoid listening to too many one after the other - to do so would be rather like overindulging in rich chocolate but heard a few at a time they are irresistible.  As ever Hyperion has done a real service for connoisseurs of French song with its 2 volume set of Hahn and several other single discs including this one of songs from and about Venice.

Venezia is a short cycle of six songs for tenor and piano with some other solo voices joining in the the last song. It is written in a popular Italian dialect but that hardly matters. What is so compelling about the music is how, in some simple gestures, Hahn conjures up the dream atmosphere of being serenaded in a gondola as you an oarsman gently propels you along a canal.

I knew the second song - La barchetta - indeed this performance by Rolfe Johnson is one of my favourite recordings of anything. He transforms himself from this rather proper English tenor who grew up in the English cathedral repertoire into a completely seductive Venetian lover- it is quite a revelation.  Hahn himself recorded his song to his own accompaniment - famously managing the melismas at the end of each verse in a single breath. But his performance is much more matter of fact that the one here. 

I’d not heard the entire cycle before - I loved it and will certainly be returning to it. Hahn is such a fascinating character - he was born in Venezuela and came to France as a chance. He knew everybody who mattered in literary and musical circles and ended his life after returning to France after exile during the Second World War (he was Jewish) to become director of the Opéra in Paris. He could never be ranked as a major composer but he is surely one of the most lovable of all those who didn’t quite make it to the very highest rung.