A standard vocal recital has the singer stealing the limelight from an all too often anonymous pianist, and the repertoire lightening up towards the end. Marianne Crebassa’s Wigmore Hall debut was not standard. Her partnership with the pianist and composer Fazıl Say is that of a true duo, honed on their 2017 album Secrets, from which much of this programme was taken. You could hear the easy give and take in Debussy’s three Verlaine settings and in two songs each by Fauré and Duparc. Say had solos, including two sonorous Debussy preludes and Satie’s Gnossiennes, plodding pieces when heard next to Debussy’s mercurial brilliance, but persuasively done nonetheless.
As for lightening up – not a chance. The final works were two long pieces by Say inspired by the 2013 unrest in Istanbul’s Gezi Park, one a frenzied piano sonata, the other a wordless song of despair and powerful defiance. It was with something approaching guilty relief that the audience lapped up Crebassa’s cheery, cheeky encore, Mozart’s Voi che sapete.
Yet that last song by Say, and the similarly wordless habanera by Ravel that had closed the first half, had been highlights, throwing the focus unapologetically onto Crebassa’s rich, complex and spring-loaded tone and bringing long, arching lines instead of the articulated, syllabic delivery she sometimes favoured elsewhere. Her voice sounded vibrant, and perhaps overly generous; it wasn’t until the closing lines of Ravel’s Shéhérazade, near the end of the first half, that she ventured her first truly quiet singing, and meanwhile some of those songs’ misty, perfumed sensuousness went missing. When Crebassa returns to the Wigmore – soon, surely – it will be rewarding to hear her experiment with its potential for intimacy.
• Available to stream on Wigmore Hall’s YouTube channel.
