Pieces Pittoresques - Chabrier, Debussy / Margaret Mills
Regular price
$18.99
Unit price
per
- Cambria
- January 1, 2002
CHABRIER Pièces pittoresques. Bourée fantasque. DEBUSSY Suite bergamasque • Margaret Mills (pn) • CAMBRIA 1128 (65:25)
Sometimes I wonder if the French want to keep Emmanuel Chabrier strictly to themselves. One might be excused for thinking that based on how well kept a secret much of his music seems to be. Yes, a significant portion of his oeuvre has been recorded, but how often are his works other than España and Joyeuse marche performed live or his operas staged? My own moment of enlightenment came a few years ago when I heard a disc of the composer’s songs. They were exquisite beyond description; finesse, refinement, delicacy, subtlety, and musical instinct for the prosody of the verses tell only of surface elements. The beauties of the music are indescribable.
Short-lived Alexis-Emmanuel Chabrier (1841–94) was an unassuming intellectual giant among his French Romantic peers. His biography was written by Poulenc, Stravinsky alluded to España in Petrushka , Strauss conducted the first staged performance of Chabrier’s incomplete opera Briséïs , and Ravel wrote that the opening bars of Le Roi malgré lui changed the course of harmony in France. Chabrier rubbed elbows with the great French painters, writers, composers, and thinkers of the day—Monet, Manet, Degas, Cézanne, Renoir, Fauré, d’Indy, Chausson, Mallarmé, Zola, and countless others—and then became enamored of the operas of Wagner, a passion that conflicted with his own musical personality and essential Frenchness of temperament and sensibility, this according to R. Myers in his 1969 book, Emmanuel Chabrier and His Circle.
Though beset by financial worries, Chabrier managed to collect paintings by Monet, Manet, Renoir, and Sisley (probably on the cheap when they were new, just as Gertrude Stein snatched up a number of Picassos), which, on the auction block today, would go for millions of dollars. It remains a mystery why Chabrier, so highly regarded by so many of France’s Bohemian and avant-garde arts and letters community, is today so neglected.
Chabrier’s Pièces pittoresques in all likelihood wasn’t, but could have been, a model for Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin . The Pièces pittoresques was written in 1880 while the composer was on a convalescent holiday at the coastal resort of Saint-Pair. The work is composed of 10 miniature tone paintings, of which the sixth, “Idylle,” has enjoyed a life of its own outside of the set. César Franck, present at the work’s premiere in 1881, remarked that “this music links our own time to that of Couperin and Rameau,” a comment Ravel may have been aware of when he set about composing Le Tombeau de Couperin in 1914.
The individual numbers of the Pièces pittoresques are highly evocative and atmospheric. They form no suite, advance no narrative, and present no discernible progression of keys, though there does seem to be a reciprocal correspondence between two major keys and their relative minors: C Major and A Minor, and B?-Major and G Minor; but the set begins in D?-Major and ends in D Major, undermining any attempt to come up with a logical sequence. The pieces are all over the map in terms of the scenes and moods they depict—a “Melancholy” precedes a “Whirlwind,” and an “Idylle” precedes a “Village Dance.” Each is a perfect, polished gem that can easily stand by itself as a cameo character piece.
One of Chabrier’s last completed works, the Bourée fantasque , written in 1891 for the pianist Édouard Risler, cries out for orchestration; indeed, the composer did begin orchestrating it, but left the scoring unfinished. Three full orchestral versions were subsequently made by Felix Mottl in 1898, Charles Koechlin in 1924, and Robin Holloway in 1994. To Risler, Chabrier wrote that he counted 113 different sonorities in the piece, which lasts just over six minutes. Alfred Cortot cited the Bourée fantasque as “one of the most exciting and original works in the whole literature of French piano music.”
Debussy’s Suite bergamasque needs little introduction. It has become one of the composer’s most popular piano works, though according to Paul Roberts, in his 1994 book, Images: The Piano Music of Claude Debussy , the composer came to loathe the earlier piano style in which these pieces were written. Tell that to the millions of music lovers, piano students, and purveyors of background music who have embraced the suite’s third movement, “Claire de lune.”
As in a Margaret Mills companion disc I review in this issue of piano works by Schonthal and Liebermann, the pianist paints all of these musical portraits with a palette of shimmering tonal colors that seem magically to take on the unique characters of each piece. Some players place their own fingerprints on a given score. With Mills, one has the feeling that she allows the score to dictate the mix of touch, tone, pedaling, and washes of color so that the piece reveals its own way of being played rather than its way of being played coming from the player. I’ve heard other pianists in these works, notably Angela Hewitt and Kathryn Stott in the Chabrier and too many to recall in the Debussy, but Mills thoroughly charms and beguiles me in this music. Strongly recommended.
FANFARE: Jerry Dubins
Product Description:
-
Release Date: January 01, 2002
-
UPC: 021475011285
-
Catalog Number: CD1128
-
Label: Cambria
-
Number of Discs: 1
-
Composer: Debussy, Chabrier
-
Performer: Piano, Margaret Mills