Lucie Vellère (1896-1966)
Music comes as it likes…
Songs, chamber and choral music, piano works
Coline Dutilleul (mezzo-soprano)
Justine Eckhaut, Philippe Riga, Thérèse Malengreau (piano)
Sonoro Quartet, Viride Quartet
Choeur de Chambre de Namur / Thibaut Lenaerts
rec. 2024-2025, Grand Manège, Namur Concert Hall, Namur, Belgium
Musique en Wallonie MEW2513[2 CDs: 143]
The Belgian composer Lucie Vellère, with a relatively large output, is still too little known. Some biographical information may prove useful. Lucie Vellère (née Weiler) was born in Brussels into a well-off family of Jewish artisans and merchants. Her father Henry Weiler left Paris for Brussels, where he founded a pasta and biscuit factory and opened several shops in the city.
The family was very musical. The father was a capable amateur musician; he had his house in the neighbourhood of Ixelles built around the music room. He taught his daughters Lucie and Simone rudiments of solfeggio and piano. Lucie then had private lessons with the violinist Emile Chaumont. Later still, she undertook more advanced study with two professors from the Brussels Conservatoire, Paul Miry for harmony and Joseph Jongen for composition. Lucie’s first compositions were somewhat influenced by Franck and, more importantly, by Fauré, Debussy and Ravel, and somewhat later by early Stravinsky and the French Groupe des Six (who were introduced in Brussels by Paul Collaer).
Vellère married her cousin René Kohn. They had a daughter who was to play an important part in helping preserve her mother’s music. Things changed during the Great Depression: it had a severe financial effect on the family business. By that time, too, her marriage broke up. The divorce forced her to find a way to support herself and her daughter. She worked for her brother-in-law, a chemist, and devoted her free time to music as much as possible. When World War II broke out, her friend Valentine Brunfaut managed to hide her away, so she avoided deportation; she changed her name to Vellère (the French pronunciation of her Jewish-sounding name). She went on composing until long after her retirement. She died after a long and painful illness.
Her oeuvre, some eighty works, comprises mainly piano and chamber works, among them four string quartets (1937, 1942, 1951 and 1962), plus songs and choral music. She also wrote a handful of works for orchestra, including the Petite Symphonie for strings (1956), Epitaphe pour un ami for viola and strings (1964) and Fantaisie en trois mouvements (violin and orchestra, 1958). Most pieces await their first recording, if they even have ever been performed. This generously filled release offers a fairly wide-ranging survey of her songs, choral and piano music. One must wait for her orchestral music to be recorded.
There is no need, I think, to discuss each work on this programme. Some may be singled out, for various reasons. One of the earliest here is the Trois ballades de Paul Fort. One of three poems, La Ronde, was set to music by a number of musicians:s Jean Absil, Jean Hubeau, Gabriel Pierné and Philippe Gaubert, to name but a few. Composition competitions also gave Vellère opportunities to write in various genres but principally songs. Some, such as Faune, did not earn her any prize but brought her name to a larger audience.
Vellère wrote songs for voice and string quartet, such as Vieille chanson du Xe siècle or the very fine Berceuse on a poem by Francis Carco. She also composed pieces for voice and double string quartet, such as Ô blanche fleur des airs and the strongly personal Vous m’avez dit, tel soir from 1940, the setting of a beautiful poem by Emile Verhaeren. It ends with words that must have resonated deeply, and doubly for her, in this troubled period: “that at that moment, I would have seen without fear the winding roads that lead to the tomb”. The earlier Toi et moi is another deeply personal work: Paul Géraldy’s bittersweet words no doubt reflect her disillusionment with her own marriage.
An important chamber work here is the Fourth String Quartet, Vellère’s last one, composed in memory of Dr Lefebvre, a friend and an amateur violinist. This concise work in three movements almost inevitably looks back to Ravel mainly in the outer movements. The central Lamento, poignant without any sentimentality, does not fail move. This is a very fine work. I would like to know Vellère’s other three string quartets.
The first disc concludes with choral music. Surprisingly enough, Air de Syrinx on a text by Paul Claudel was the only one of Vellère’s works to earn international recognition. It was awarded the first prize by the jury – all men, incidentally – of the International composition contest for women composers: spiritus ubi vult spirat, indeed. Vellère first planned to set this long poem as a song for voice and piano but her initial attempts came to nothing. She then had the idea to set it for a small women’s chorus – and it worked wonderfully well. According to her own words, “it has then been so easy and it took me only two days to write the music”. The result is a splendid, if challenging, piece for women’s voices.
The other choral works are for women’s voices and piano. Petites histoires sets poems by various poets, Chansons enfantines – poems by Maurice Carême. His simple, direct verse has long been composers’ favourite. It was set by Belgians (Jean Absil, Renier Van der Velden, Jacques Stehman, Norbert Rosseau and Willem Pelemans, to name a few that come to mind) and by French (Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Henri Sauguet and Florent Schmitt). Chansons enfantines may be suitable for children’s voices, and quite fun to sing.
The second disc presents a selection of Lucie Vellère’s piano music, mainly sets of short pieces, thus no large-scale sonatas. Pianist Thérèse Malengreau chose sets that the composer arranged as suites of some sort; the earliest and the latest are separated by 48 years. This piano music clearly harks back to that of Vellère’s admired French impressionists and her teacher Joseph Jongen. It is none the worse for that: it is communicative, superbly and idiomatically written for the instrument.
The music is clearly articulated and quite imaginative without ever going over the boundaries of (sometimes enlarged) tonality, or of modality. Some of the late works, such as Feuillets épars might be looking in a somewhat different direction. All through her composing career Vellère, favoured melody, even in her instrumental music. It makes her music, in particular piano music, immediately attractive, fresh and spontaneous.
These generously filled discs offer a fair survey of Lucie Vellère’s compositional output. All performances do full justice to her idiomatic, sincere, colourful and emotionally varied music. Mezzo-soprano Coline Dutilleul sings wonderfully, superbly partnered by pianist Justine Eeckaut, the Viride Quartet and the Sonoro Quartet; the latter play the very fine String Quartet No.4. The Choeur de chambre de Namur sing the choral items with remarkable aplomb, particularly in the tricky Air de Syrinx. They obviously enjoy themselves enormously in the two other cycles. Thérèse Malengreau has long championed Belgian piano music. She devotes scholarship and loving care to it – as she does in this selection of Vellère’s piano works.
This splendid release is one of the finest I have heard so far. It will feature high up in my Recordings of the Year. I recommend it unreservedly to anyone who likes attractive and sincere music-making.
Hubert Culot
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Contents
Vocal and instrumental music
Trois Ballades de Paul Fort (1918)
Faune (1933)
Vous m’avez dit, tel soir – Voice and double string quartet (1940)
Ô blanche fleur des airs – Voice and double string quartet (1934)
Egarement (1952)
Toi et moi (1921)
Trois petits poèmes (1934)
Vieille chanson du Xe siècle – Voice and string quartet (1919)
Berceuse – Voice and string quartet (1933)
Quatrième quatuor à cordes (1962)
Air de Syrinx – Female voices (1956)
Petites histoires – Female voices (1949)
Chansons enfantines – Female voices and piano (1959/1964)
Piano works
Trois tanagras (1918)
Promenade au bord du lac (1959)
Préludes pour la jeunesse (1950)
Feuillets épars (1966)
