This new album presents a delightful selection of Poulenc’s piano music, starting with the intriguing little Valse (1919) from L’Album des Six, which first presented in published form the collective of Franco-Swiss composers who came to be known under that title. As the fruit of a trip to Italy in the company of Darius Milhaud, a fellow Les Six-er, Napoli is a suite written in 1925 and presenting Italian forms through the light of Poulenc’s irrepressible personality.
More affecting are the eight Nocturnes, composed between 1929 and 1938, and the three Novelettes (1927-1959), while the ’Six petites pièces enfantines’ that make up the Villageoises of 1933 share the a spirit of gentle playfulness with Poulenc’s popular musical tale, Babar the Elephant. One day when Poulenc was improvising on the piano, his cousin’s little girl exclaimed: “Grandfather, it’s so boring when you play like that, why don’t you play us this?”. And in 1945, once the dreadful war years were over, Poulenc was happy to oblige.
The Trois Mouvements perpetuels are early pieces, a product of the kaleidoscopic ‘harlequin years’ of Paris in the 1920s. The three movements reveal a musical freshness and fluidity somewhat reminiscent of Satie, whose individualistic approach to life and art inspired the members of Les Six, to whom he served as a kind of honorary president. Finally, Poulenc evokes the spirit of Bach returns in a surprising guise in the Valse-Improvisation sur le nom de Bach, a piece bursting with vitality, in perfect keeping with the famous pianist Vladimir Horowitz, to whom it was dedicated.
Two previous albums by Chiara Cipelli on Brilliant Classics and Piano Classics have won enthusiastic praise from reviewers in Fanfare magazine. The piano music of Bruno Bettinelli is ‘presented with wonderful vigour and colour by the fine young Lombardy native Chiara Cipelli’ (95801), while ‘Cipelli’s technical capabilities are impressive throughout’ her selection of early Messiaen pieces (PCL10200).

“Après un rêve” is an ode to the French Belle Époque repertoire, depicting the beauty of dreams and the night. The album is an opportunity to hear and perhaps discover rarely played / rarely recorded wonderful works (Chaminade Nocturne, Duparc Aux étoiles, Poulenc Les soirées de Nazelles), alongside central pillars of the repertoire, and includes a world premiere of Despax’s arrangement of Après un rêve. The album is attributed to his grandfather, Jacques Charpentreau, a French poet who adored this repertoire and frequently drew inspiration from the night in his works. Despax has curated some of his poetry, as well as works by other poets he admired to complement this music, taking the listener on an immersive poetic and musical journey through this noctur- nal landscape.

REVIEW:

Despax has recorded Bach, Brahms, Chopin, but the works here particularly suit his sensibility. In Maurice Ravel’s haunting masterpiece Gaspard de la Nuit, he masters the ferocious challenges with ease, delicacy, strength.

-- The Guardian (UK)

When we think of a concerto for solo instrument and orchestra, the organ is certainly not the first instrument that comes to mind. And yet, the symphonic organ is perfectly adapted to the role of soloist, being capable of duelling as well as duetting with the orchestra. The Concerto for organ, strings, horns and timpani Op. 100 by Marco Enrico Bossi, for example, is one of the most important and successful pieces in the entire repertoire, and yet it does not enjoy the recognition it deserves among the wider public. Structured in three movements of genuine expressive power, this is music that is both majestic and intimate, able to touch the hearts of listeners and performers alike – a work on which this great composer really lavished his extraordinary creativity.

Hymne by Joseph Jongen is a real rarity. The organ has less of a ‘solo’ role than in the Bossi and Poulenc works; rather, it blends into the warm textures of the orchestra as an integral part of the sonic conversational flow so typical of Jongen’s impressionist idiom. Here too, the composition of the Gland organ and its eminently full, warm and poetic sound are an ideal showcase for the mysterious atmosphere of this work.

Unlike the Bossi and Jongen works, the Concerto for organ, strings and timpani by Francis Poulenc is very well known indeed. Uncharacteristically written in a single movement divided into seven sections, this concerto is surely one of the best-known organ works of the 20th century. In certain sections the sonorous, weighty and deliberately strident organ writing is juxtaposed alongside orchestral textures that are extremely graceful and poetic, almost like a rough country giant trying to attract the attentions of a refined princess. At other moments, the organ imposes itself upon the orchestra, only to come together with it at other times, before proceeding to turn everything upside down once again.