DUTILLEUX Piano Sonata. 3 Préludes. Au gré des ondes. Bergerie. Blackbird. Tous les chemins . . . mènent à Rome. Résonances. Petit air à dormir debout. Mini-prélude en éventail • John Chen (pn) • NAXOS 8.557823 (61:23)


In 2004, Kuala Lumpa-born pianist John Chen became the youngest-ever winner of the Sydney International Piano Competition. On the evidence of this disc, it is easy to share the jury’s enthusiasm for this young man. His choice of repertoire is at once brave and praiseworthy; the complete piano music of Henri Dutilleux fits neatly on one disc and acts as a reminder of the stature of this fine composer.


The 1948 Piano Sonata is surely Dutilleux’s most famous work for this instrument. John Ogdon made a famous recording (apparently currently unavailable and last seen on a hard to find EMI Matrix disc) and more recently the highly talented Claire-Marie Le Guay recorded her thoughts on the score. Chen finds the perfect atmosphere for the opening, conjuring up an explicitlly French world related to but not derivative of Messiaen. Chen finds much sense of play in the capricious opening section. His light touch has much to do with this; in fact, he owns a wide tonal range that enables him to bring real depth to the more sonorous, contrastive sections. The ultra-gentle second movement, entitled “Lied” by the composer, rises inevitably to a climax of cut crystal clarity. Chen brings out a processional quality that seems most apt, while the finale reveals Chen’s superb fingerwork (tremendous Debussian roulades here).


The first of the Trois Préludes seems again to make explicit reference to the rarefied world of Debussy; the second, even more so. This is truly beautiful music, and Chen holds back interpretative intervention just enough to enable the music to speak naturally while still adding his own stamp to the score. The third Prélude was written over a decade later than the other two and at nearly eight minutes is by far the most substantial. Exploratory in nature but nevertheless clearly highly structured, it leaves a lasting impression.


Au gré des ondes of 1946 is a sequence of six movements taken from Dutilleux’s work at Radio France to provide interludes between programs. There is a simplicity here that is utterly charming (“Prélude en berceuse”), pure (“Hommage à Bach”) and even almost jazzy (“Mouvement perpétuel”). The remainder of the disc is devoted to miniatures, of which the 1965 Résonances is probably the most important for the composer’s development in its exploration of sonority.


This is a significant disc in two ways. First, the complete Dutilleux piano music at bargain price in fine performances and recording is a must for all fans of this composer; second, here we have an introduction to a pianist who is clearly a major talent.


FANFARE: Colin Clarke

This outstanding album recorded by the Orchestre national des Pays de la Loire presents some of the works of composer Henri Dutilleux, which were composed before 1954. Several of these works are recorded for the first time on this album. Featured works on this recording include the complete score of Dutilleux’s ballet Le Loup, and Trois Tableaux symphoniques, which was originally written as incidental music for a stage production of Wuthering Heights. Conducting the Ochestre National des Pays de la Loire is Pascal Rophe, and baritone Vincent Le Texier is featured on the pieces Trois Sonnets and Quatre Melodies.

Reviews:

This music might play it safe harmonically but Dutilleux splashes orchestral timbres around with the abandon of an action painter, as blood-curdling swoops from an ondes martenot add local colour. Pascal Rophé and his Orchestra National des Pays de la Loire take these scores at face value, carving through notes with flamboyant cliffhanger urgency.

– Gramophone

Dutilleux shows his attraction towards Alban Berg's orchestral colors, and the playing throughout the disc is superb, using a vast range of dynamics.

– BBC Music Magazine

Though Dutilleux began composing at an early age and undertook the rigorous course of study at the Paris Conservatoire, culminating in the much sought-after Prix de Rome in 1938 with a cantata, he regarded his Piano Sonata of 1946-8 as an Opus 1. This attitude was characteristic of a remarkably fastidious and self-critical composer who dedicated his life to composition –and the nurturing of young composers –and yet whose published output is influential out of all proportion to its size. He wrote the sonata for the pianist Geneviève Joy whom he married in 1946. The musical language is as much modal as tonal, owing as much to Bartók’s methods of musical organization and the 19th-century Germanic concept of the large-scale masterpiece as contemporary developments in harmony. Everything he wrote seems to repudiate the commonly held idea that French music is essentially frivolous and charming, but Dutilleux’s music can smile and relax, too: while working at French radio he composed a series of short pastiche pieces as air-filler, later compiling them as a suite, Au gré des ondes. Blackbird is Dutilleux’s sole trespass on the territory of his contemporary Messiaen: knowingly brief and non-naturalistic by comparison, a portrait of the blackbird’s soul more than its song. The Debussian heritage of painting on the piano comes to the fore on the set of Three Preludes composed between 1973 and 1988, while Resonances is a study in timbre built with the composer’s individual technique of pivot notes and chords. As Vittoria Quartararo observes in her booklet introduction, ‘the music of Dutilleux often seems to shift towards a visual level. While the verticality of piano chords can resonate like light does on a black canvas, one’s gaze becomes more horizontal, distant, and at times visionary, detecting the reverberation of a sound transformed in liquid crystal.’

Following the success of their previous album, English Music for Strings, John Wilson and his Sinfonia of London turn their attention to the music of Henri Dutilleux. His ballet Le Loup was composed as a commission for Roland Petit’s dance company and premièred in Paris in March 1953. Rarely recorded – this is the first recording by a non-French orchestra – the work unfolds in three tableaux and tells a convoluted tale of a bridegroom who jilts his bride (to run away with a gypsy) by persuading her that he has been changed into a wolf. Over time she discovers that the wolf is real, but her feelings turn from terror to love and when the alarmed villagers hunt the wolf, she defends him and dies at his side. The album is completed by three world première recordings of new orchestrations (by Kenneth Hesketh) of wind solos written for the Paris Conservatoire in the 1940s. Both the Sarabande et Cortège and Sonate pour hautbois are virtuosic tours de force for their soloists, as is the Sonatine pour flûte, which displays the lyricism, agility, and sparkling incisive qualities of the flute in what became Dutilleux’s most-performed work.