Gérard Souzay is the stagename of Gérard Marcel Tisserand, a French singer born in 1918. He started his career just after 1945 with mainly French and German repertoire. During his career he was renowned for his mastery of 13 different languages. He was singing in opera (Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande was a favorite for him) but the recitals like on this recording were more to his liking. He died in 2004 in the south of France.
Somehow a lot of my classical collection consists of these old artists. They are either deceased, or no longer active. It is hard to find records of classical music from currently active artists. That also means that in listening to classical music on records, you’ll find yourself hopelessly outdated with respect to current performance practice. I go to concerts, I use streaming for newer material, but I would like to have more recent classical music on record. Somehow the whole hipster movement with playing records has never reached the old garde of classical music listeners.