DINU LIPATTI - THE LAST RECITAL
From the original master tape
The aim of the present release of Dinu Lipatti’s last recital at the Besançon Festival – about which we know the dramatic conditions in which it took place – is to give, for the first time, a version not only complete but going back to the best sources. And it is once again thanks to the I.N.A. (National Audiovisual Institute) that, by chance, we found the original tape from 1950, recorded with the means of the French Radio (R.T.F.). Solstice elected to release this recital as preserved on the original tapes – with the presence of hiss. This was an artistic choice stemming from a concern for authenticity. With all the customary reservations, we thus have grounds for considering the present version historic.
Yvette Carbou
ref. SOCD 358
FRANÇOIS BOUSCH
"Chant of spaces" and other concertant works
Composer and teacher, François Bousch (born in 1946) was the student of Betsy Jolas, Claude Ballif, Jean-Pierre Guézec and Olivier Messiaen, amongst others. A resident of the Villa Médicis in Rome, he began a ‘fruitful relationship’ there with Giacinto Scelsi. Like Monsieur Jourdain making prose without knowing it, this artist, a poet-improviser, was an unknowing precursor of what would become ‘spectral music’. To this end, it should be pointed out that, beginning in 1976, François Bousch composed a spectral score baptised Souffle de vie-lumière for large orchestra. In its wake, like the remarks of composers of the ensemble L’Itinéraire (collective to which he belonged from its founding), his principal credo presided over the skilful ‘sculpture’ of sound matter rather than a mere juxtaposition of more or less heterogeneous materials. Besides, the composer likes to confide that, to him, his music often seems closer to ‘matter’ than to ‘material’, favouring the ‘constituent’ rather than the ‘constituted’.
Pierre Albert Castanet
ref. SOCD 355
DIEGO TOSI
Sarasate - Gounod
It will be noted that these three great sets of variations by Sarasate are youthful compositions. Nonetheless, we already find a fairly synthetic way of developing the main themes. It was by taking that into account I permitted myself to start from these compositions to go, if possible, even further in respecting the primary wish of their author.
The instrumentation that I wanted to generalise for string orchestra seemed quite appropriate for giving the soloist a foundation, a dialogue, a combat or a discussion in the same sonic grain.
Daniel Tosi
ref. SOCD 353
BARTOK AND VIRTUOSITY
Takuya Otaki, OCI Winner
Virtuosity is the dream of every adventurous pianist, coupled with the taste for risk, and almost for the random, staging and endangering, and of the extreme. This was not unknown to the young Béla Bartók. Slipping into the magician’s suit, young, handsome, and charming as was Franz Liszt, himself borrowing the lyricism and madness of ‘gypsy’ musicians’ improvisation without too many ethnological scruples, he ‘surfed’ from glissandos to tremolos, vying with Paganini’s violin. He was to assert himself in a society marked by the successes of performing musicians whose fame was, in this end of an era, beginning to be almost more important than that of the composers.
Françoise Thinat
ref. SOCD 350
DRAMATIC LYRICISM
Liszt and Mussorgsky, by Yuki Kondo
The parallel between Franz Liszt (1811-1886) and Modeste Mussorgsky (1839-1881) represented by the present programme might only seem like a deliberate choice, justified solely by the virtuosity displayed in the piano works by each composer. However, looking more closely, it becomes clear that, beyond the journey of Mazeppa, which inspired one of Liszt’s most famous symphonic poems, both musicians share this Slavic tropism for dramatic lyricism, an inscription in the Romanticism of the national schools of which both are important representatives.
From Franz Liszt to Modest Mussorgsky, virtuosity and the renewal of piano writing are the vectors of a song of the soul, from its earthly ties to its transcendental aspirations, and it is precisely to this voyage that Yuki Kondo invites us with the present programme.
Lionel Pons
ref. SOCD 356
VIOLON & PIANO
A temporary panorama
A recording project bringing together a body of masterworks is always a significant act allowing for celebrating and honouring as well as thinking musical practices. The virtuosity with which the performers occupy the intention of the present programme is a guarantee of the sensitive awareness necessary for such a project whilst bearing witness to the duettists’ profound desire to give life to and transmit the music of our time with excellence and generosity.
Benoît Sitzia
ref. SOCD 357
PIERRE COCHEREAU
2 unissued Improvised Suites
More improvisations by Pierre Cochereau? Have we not already been sated with his art in the genre, an art radiant above all in the large form through his symphonic creations in four or five movements, generously inspired by listening to the mystical vessel of Notre-Dame de Paris? That would be to forget, precisely in this domain of the large form, that Pierre Cochereau’s art stemmed just as much from the coordinated mastery of all the structural and aesthetic components, from the most fundamental to the most minute, endowing his improvised symphonies with a sweep and a density that indeed give the impression of being able to apprehend them in a ‘global’, overall manner, like a highly coherent whole. However, such a completeness would be unthinkable were it not masterfully worked in the sense of the detail finished in itself, always as compared with and in service to the depth of musical emotion felt and transmitted.
Michel Roubinet
ref. SOCD 349
MARCEL DUPRÉ'S ART OF PIANO
By François-Michel Rignol
Although the piano occupies a significant place in Dupré’s oeuvre, it concerns above all the first part of his career as a musician, a period during which he wrote relatively little for the organ. He would take up with the piano again later on, in the very particular, much more personal context of the piano and organ. ‘After 1920,’ writes Abbé Delestre, ‘specialisation occurs, and the organ will remain at the centre of his output, as if to make it converge entirely on it.’ Beforehand, from the outset, the piano is present, without being exclusive.
Michel Roubinet
ref. SOCD 348
Selva/Columbia
SOCD 351/2
Demessieux/Labric
SOCD 346/7
Piazzolla/Abinasr
SOCD 345
Lefébure/Legend
SOCD 321/44
Tosi/Violin-Phase
SOCD 320
Séverac/Melodies
SOCD 319
F.Thinat
SOCD 315/6
Phonic Design/Tosi
SOCD 318
Mussorgsky/Gil
SOCD 313
Torres/Gascon Villa
SOCD 314
Imri Talgam
SOCD 317
Mulet/Monin
SOCD 311
Canat de Chizy
SOCD 312
Cochereau/In concert
SOCD 310
Schubert/Braide
SOCD 309