The Art of Germaine Montero

Germaine Montero was born in France, but her first success as a singer came in Spain. Her ease in both the Iberian musical idiom and the existentialist songs of St. Gér-maine des Près, the perfection of her French and Spanish—her name itself —indicate a mixed parentage. That she can move so deftly from one to the other of two sharply differing cultures marks the nature of her artistry. (Of the four records she has made for Vanguard, one was awarded the Grand Prix du Disque for “excellence of performance and beauty of sound.”)

I was first attracted to Germaine Montero’s singing by a 10-inch LP, Songs of Parisian Nights. (It has since been reissued on a 12-inch disc, backed by the rather mechanical music and feebly transposed lyrics of Mère Courage—the Paul Dessau-Bertold Brecht music drama.) In the Parisian songs, Montero’s voice, rich and plangent, scanned the full range of that curiously inverted music which postwar Montmartre created. From the sardonic to the sentimental, from the delicate to the exuberant, from the tender to the chillingly macabre, she evoked the murky world of penitents and prostitutes, of fools and philosophers, who inhabit the boîtes where she sang. In another postwar era, Marlene Dietrich had done the same for the determined decadence of Berlin—but Marlene lacked the voice and subsisted on the manner. Germaine Montero brought to these songs the peculiarly Gallic style and phrasing—and a first-rate instrument.

RT

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Ralph de Toledano

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Germaine Montero was born in France, but her first success as a singer came in Spain. Her ease in both the Iberian musical idiom and the existentialist songs of St. Gér-maine des Près, the perfection of her French and Spanish—her name itself —indicate a mixed parentage. That she can move so deftly from one to the other of two sharply differing cultures marks the nature of her artistry. (Of the four records she has made for Vanguard, one was awarded the Grand Prix du Disque for “excellence of performance and beauty of sound.”)

I was first attracted to Germaine Montero’s singing by a 10-inch LP, Songs of Parisian Nights. (It has since been reissued on a 12-inch disc, backed by the rather mechanical music and feebly transposed lyrics of Mère Courage—the Paul Dessau-Bertold Brecht music drama.) In the Parisian songs, Montero’s voice, rich and plangent, scanned the full range of that curiously inverted music which postwar Montmartre created. From the sardonic to the sentimental, from the delicate to the exuberant, from the tender to the chillingly macabre, she evoked the murky world of penitents and prostitutes, of fools and philosophers, who inhabit the boîtes where she sang. In another postwar era, Marlene Dietrich had done the same for the determined decadence of Berlin—but Marlene lacked the voice and subsisted on the manner. Germaine Montero brought to these songs the peculiarly Gallic style and phrasing—and a first-rate instrument.