Lightly directed by Robert Hollingworth, the vocal ensemble I Fagiolini’s Wigmore programme had a relaxed, seasonal feel, not least because the largest work on the programme – Jean Françaix’s Ode à la Gastronomie – was a paean to the delights of epicureanism and simultaneously a timely warning of its dangers.
Dating from 1953, the Ode was here receiving its belated London premiere. It sets a classic text of French culinary writing, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s Physiologie du Goût, extolling the pleasures of haute cuisine while flagging up the perils of over-indulgence.
For a lightweight piece, though, the result felt on the long side, even in this buoyant account. Add in its sheer difficulty – only a virtuoso group such as I Fagiolini could even begin to contemplate tackling it – and it seems scarcely surprising that the result is so rarely performed.
Younger by a generation than the group of French composers known as Les Six, Françaix is more easily identified as a later proponent of their central aesthetic values of wit and sheer chic, as opposed to registering as a follower of the more delicately sensuous path laid out by Fauré – whose Poème d’un jour was carefully articulated by tenor Matthew Long and sensitively accompanied by Anna Markland.
But on this occasion, two members of Les Six were represented by more serious works – Poulenc by a clean-edged account of his Sept Chansons, Milhaud by a similarly direct interpretation of his Deux Poèmes – both of which found I Fagiolini on excellent form.
So did the only non-French item on the programme, Roderick Williams’s cycle Is 5, a group of EE Cummings settings whose performance also marked the baritone/composer’s (and former Fagiolino’s) 50th birthday. If these lacked some of the grace and precision of the programme’s Gallic constituents, Williams’s vocal arrangement of the slow movement of Ravel’s G-major piano concerto with Markland as soloist clearly went down well.
