Album review

Juliette Gréco

Le Temps d’une Chanson

Paris 

07/12/2006 - 

A new album without a single new song on it – only a ‘chanson’ great like Juliette Gréco could pull a stunt like that! Gréco, still the most elegant of brunettes at 79, has chosen to pay tribute to the legendary names of French music, covering time-honoured classics by the likes of Jacques Brel, Serge Gainsbourg and Charles Trenet  as well as more recent material. One listen to the album proves that the grande dame’s rich, velvet tones resonate as beautifully and profoundly as ever

Listening to Le temps d’une chanson brings whole periods of Gréco’s earlier career to life again, highlighting the privileged relationship she enjoyed with the most gifted songwriters of the day - Serge Gainsbourg, Léo Ferré, and Jacques Brel to name but a few! These poetic lyric writers provided memorable material for the Left Bank diva, Gainsbourg penning La Javanaise (amongst many other songs) for Gréco, Ferré giving her Jolie Môme and Brel J’arrive. Honouring all three songwriters on her new album, Gréco launches into stunning covers of La chanson de Prévert, Ferré’s Avec le temps and Brel’s Mathilde, which she describes as “one of the most beautiful love songs ever written…” “That alone is enough to justify me taking this enormous risk,” she declares on the promotional material to her album, adding “I wait, trembling, to hear what you think.”

No need for any nerves on Gréco’s part. With Le temps d’une chanson, the grande dame of ‘chanson’ proves that her voice has lost none of its depth or its power to stir emotions. And if she trembles at all, it is with love for those who put those poetic words in her mouth, brimming with passion as she powers out Trenet’s La folle complainte, Maxime Le Forestier’s Né quelque part and Bernard Lavilliers’s Les mains d’or, savouring each and every phrase and acting out each situation as if she were performing in a play.

The orchestration on the album (courtesy of Gil Goldstein and Gérard Jouannest for the piano arrangements) is as rich as it is thorough. Gréco’s upbeat version of Mathilde  is simply superb and the only time the excellence wavers is perhaps when she makes so bold as to launch into Italian (Volare) or English (Over The Rainbow). But how could anyone reproach Gréco for having the audacity to attempt either song when so many times in her life her audacity was to be admired. Take the song, Utile, for instance with its famous lyrics A quoi sert une chanson si elle est désarmée/ Je veux être utile à vivre et à chanter (What use is a song if it is unarmed / I want to be useful, useful living and useful singing). A song which cannot help but call to mind the concert Gréco performed in General Pinochet’s Chile, during which she performed a series of openly anti-military numbers in front of rows of soldiers.

Juliette Gréco is a woman who has always stuck to her guns, no matter what the consequences. And, fittingly, her new album includes a cover of Les amants d’un jour. When Gréco fell in love with the song in 1956 and tried to make it hers, its author Marguerite Monnot famously warned her, “If I give you this, Edith Piaf will kill m

Juliette Gréco Le temps d’une chanson (Polydor) 2006
In concert at the Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris, 13 -17 February 2007

Fleur  de la Haye