Patricia Petibon’s Wigmore debut concert shared its name, La Belle Excentrique, with her latest album, with which it had less in common than one might expect. The disc, hampered by fussy arrangements of her material to cater for a series of guest instrumentalists and vocalists, was messy. The concert, with the wonderful pianist Susan Manoff as her sole accompanist, was vastly preferable, even though it defied any attempt at conventional classification – which, of course, was the point.
The French soprano is a genuine maverick, whose self-styled “eccentricity” consists in blurring the boundaries between “serious” and popular music, her repertory ranging comfortably from tricky operatic roles – Berg’s Lulu, Blanche in Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites – to cover versions of Juliette Gréco. Her voice, a mixture of muslin and steel, is striking rather than classically beautiful, but she’s a stage animal first and foremost, and what she offers in concert is not so much a recital as a kind of cabaret-cum-surreal revue.
Her programme consisted largely of composers – Erik Satie, Leonard Bernstein, Poulenc, and so on – whose preoccupation with pushing cultural boundaries echo her own. She used props galore throughout, donning a top hat Dietrich-style for Poulenc’s Les Gars qui Vont à la Fête, while groups of songs were turned into sketches: Bernstein’s La Bonne Cuisine, a setting of recipes from a French cookery book, became a satire on culinary incompetence that would make even Gordon Ramsay blench.
She’s also perfectly capable, however, of doing a number absolutely straight, and Hahn’s À Chloris and Fauré’s Les Berceaux were were superb in their stillness and containment. She divides opinion – it’s easy to be in two minds about her – but at her best she’s a most beguiling performer, and a real breath of fresh air.
