Trevor Leighton

‘My neighbour’, ‘the man behind’, ‘a Frenchman’… One of these was ‘the little old lady’. This was Dodo, and she adored Dame Felicity Lott, whom I recently saw in recital at the Théâtre de l’Athénée Louis-Jouvet. “Quelle classe!” she would exclaim. Which is true.

We saw Lott together as the Marschallin and the Countess in Capriccio, but our happiest shared memories of all were probably of her Belle Hélène and Grande Duchesse de Gérolstein, in Laurent Pelly’s productions, high points in the Châtelet’s operatic heyday. Memorable evenings those were, among the many memorable times spent with Dodo, including a marvellous week in Istanbul (“Une très belle ville. Des toilettes propres partout!”) while she was bravely facing down her disease, which I mentioned in my garbled account of the Paris Opera’s awful Entführung in 2014. She had been diagnosed with cancer just before she retired, and was finally defeated by it six months after that Istanbul jaunt.

I don’t know Lott personally. The nearest I ever got to her was when ‘my neighbour,’ seeing she was in the same restaurant as us after Der Rosenkavalier, couldn’t resist stopping to thank her as we left. But she’s a singer who creates such a rapport with her audiences that this recital felt a bit like meeting a dear old friend after a long absence, suspecting this would be the last time… And as it coincided with the tenth anniversary of Dodo’s death, knowing how much she’d have enjoyed it meant she was on my mind all the while. In the circumstances, even I, normally soulless and stony-hearted, was affected by all this emotional charge.

As you can see above, Lott and her pianist and fellow vocalist (e.g. in Coward) Jason Carr put together an eclectic programme, but a subtle and sophisticated one, interweaving nods to various points in Lott’s career in France with wry, autumnal fin-de-carrière allusions (i.e. none of is getting any younger) and contrasting comic numbers. Lott introduced the sets and explained the choices herself, in French, divulging how much thought had gone into the clever enchaînement while creating a relaxed, familiar atmosphere.

As my neighbour (yes, he’s still with us) said afterwards, Felicity Lott’s voice, in her late 70s, ‘is what it is.’ The years have diminished it, of course. But Lott’s professionalism and technique, her total mastery of her instrument, of its capacities, of the virtues that can, in fact, be made of certain necessities, are unimpaired. She’s as attentive as ever to the text, responsive to every word, chiseling every vocal detail with her usual intelligence and finesse, and without falling into mannerism.

Her diction is still impeccable; you can take my French neighbor’s word for that, too. He understood, he told me, every word. And though her voice is, as I said, diminished, she can still muster some powerful notes in the upper middle, taking advantage of them to bring dynamic contrast and variety. She can still float ethereal pianissimi, too. And, strikingly, she can still sing through a phrase, without taking a breath, where any singer might legitimately have paused for air.

As we all know, her storytelling – tragic, ironic or outright comic – has always been perfectly judged as well: astute, sensitive, wistful but never maudlin, or knowing and wry, with occasional bursts of exuberance, but never tacky or over-the-top. Starting cold (on a chilly evening) with Auric‘s tricky Printemps was perhaps a mistake, but Lott explained that she chose it because she’d sung it on exactly the same spot forty (she rolled her eyes) years before. Once her voice was properly warmed up, the rest of the 90-minute programme, performed without a break, was a largely low-key, poignant yet dazzling display of her art.

On the humorous side, the evening’s highlight was probably Rodgers and Hart‘s “To keep my love alive,” a wicked song about disposing of successive husbands in a variety of ways. Lott delved into her repertoire of expressions and gestures, familiar from her Offenbach days, to act it out with perfect comic timing and effect.

On the more crepuscular, valedictory side, at the programme’s core were certainly Poulenc’s “La Dame de Monte Carlo”and, to end, “Les chemins de l’amour.” I must admit, I was surprised to see “La Dame de Monte Carlo” on the programme at all, seeing it as a potentially over-ambitious choice for a singer approaching (though far from looking) 80. But then I thought, Dame Felicity knows what she’s doing. And of course she did. It was a remarkable performance.

With only 550 seats, the Athénée is a little belle-époque jewel-box of a space, and I was on the fourth row. So last Monday evening offered a moving moment of intimacy with a great artist, and a welcome opportunity to pay tribute to someone who’s given us so much pleasure over the years.

Dodo would have loved it.