The French composer Francis Poulenc offered two contrasting faces to his audience: on the one hand a committed Catholic, on the other a robustly hedonistic socialite. His music comes with a similar ambivalence. The last scene of his opera Dialogues des Carmélites – in which a whole convent of nuns march, singing, to the guillotine – can be absurd if badly done, but is devastating if done well.
The same goes for an operatic scena called La voix humaine, in which a woman is abandoned by her lover through successive phone calls, leaving her distraught and suicidal. Poor performances are vulgar, good ones devastating. And a seriously good one, like a cleaver through the soul, took place last week in Middle Temple Hall, done by the English mezzo Christine Rice, accompanied by pianist Julius Drake.
