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Poulenc: La Voix Humaine Fiancailles Pour Rire on CD

In 1958 Poulenc composed La voix humaine, a one-act opera for soprano and orchestra, based on the monodrama of the same name, written for the Comédie-Française by his friend Jean Cocteau. In this staging of the end of an amorous relationship, we hear only the woman's side of a final telephone conversation with the man who has abandoned her. The orchestra in this innovative work is used not only to unify the composition, but also to reveal what the voice, laid bare by a moving parlé-chanté style, does not say. Fiançailles pour rire and Chemins de l'amour, usually for voice and piano, but presented here in an orchestrated version by one of our finest conductors, Frédéric Chaslin, completes this eloquent rendition of works of a bittersweetness that Poulenc transcends like no other.