BLANCHE SELVA

The Columbia Recordings 1929-1930

Blanche Selva let herself be talked into recording a few 78s, made in Paris and Madrid by Columbia in 1929 and 1930. The stroke she suffered a few months later put a definitive end to a sadly short recording career.
These almost two hours of music r eveal an artist in her prime, perhaps at her best.
Gilles Saint Arroman

ref. SOCD 351/2

YVONNE LEFÉBURE

A piano legend in a 24-CD box set!

It has already been thirty years since Yvonne Lefébure left us... Over these decades, we were very anxious to faithfully honour the memory of this woman who, never hesitated in giving her trust to the two novices that we were at the dawn of the 1970s.
In addition to a few gems collected abroad, it was, once again at the French National Audiovisual Institute – decidedly an inexhaustible source! – that I had the good fortune of discovering unsuspected treasures. You may judge by the quality and rarity of the numerous previously unreleased documents present in this set.
Yvette Carbou

ref. SOCD 321/44

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

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

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

PIERRE LABRIC PLAY DEMESSIEUX

Complete Organ Works

Released in 1975 in the United States as a three L.P.s set, this masterpiece recording had not been the subject of a French record production at that time.
Here it is back home at last – good to able to illuminate his valorous performer, aged 95!

ref. SOCD 346/7

Piazzolla/Abinasr
SOCD 345
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
Pachebel/Grémy-Chauliac
FYCD 874
D.d.Severac
SOCD 306/8
Saint-Saens/Labric
SOCD 305