Vincent d’Indy's massive Piano Sonata, published in 1907, demands the technique of a virtuoso performer, and rewards close attention no less than better-known examples such as the no less ambitious works from the same time by Dukas and Lekeu. The first movement unfolds as a huge and chromatic set of theme and variations, in which d’Indy’s avowed Wagnerism continually blurs tonal boundaries and erupts into distant keys.
Even larger – almost 20 minutes in length – is the finale, which seems to pick up where the eventful narrative of the first movement left off, presenting a theme which, if not modernist in its development, embraces distant realms with hardly less enthusiasm than the contemporary music of Scriabin. It is left to the central Scherzo to afford some brief and light relief, but even here the angular features of the outer movements recur.
Any seeker of piano rarities and enthusiast for the likes of Alkan and Medtner will want to make the acquaintance of D’Indy’s Piano Sonata, especially in a performance as accomplished as this recording by the young Italian pianist Sofia Andreoli. Her pairing for D’Indy’s Sonata is hardly less original: the set of Promenades composed by Albéric Magnard in 1893.
Magnard was 28 at the time, yet this suite of tone-pictures is hardly ‘youthful’ in tone. Rather, it too belongs to the heady world of French Wagnerism, exploratory and reflective in tone even as its composer wanders the streets of Paris, past the Bois de Boulogne, the Eglise Saint-Germain and the Trianon, before finding its destination in the forest of Rambouillet on the southern edge of the city. There, glinting half-lights and arboreal silence take the listener back to a space of tranquillity, inviting discovery by any adventurous explorer of the late-Romantic piano.
