January 17, 2014

  • Exploring Roussel's Piano Music

     

    Roussel: Piano Music (volume 1)
    Jean-Pierre Armengaud
    Naxos 8.573093
    Total Time:  64:14
    Recording:   ****/****
    Performance: ****/****

    Ever since first hearing Albert Roussel’s Third Symphony, I have been a fan of his music.  The third symphony is a great example of French Neo-Classicism that has parallels in work by Prokofiev more than say Stravinsky.  Roussel’s early music was still very much a part of the Impressionist milieu but his style would eventually take that atmospheric approach and apply it in often amazing slow movements.  Later, he would adopt some of the wit and jazz flavors favored by Les Six.  That wide range of musical styles that marked Roussel’s lifespan (1869-1937) often makes him more difficult to pinpoint in French musical life.  Interest in line and rhythm might even place him in a sense with Symbolist tendencies.  But his work is certainly worth exploring as it often tends to feature brilliant orchestration and great drama.  The latter is part of some of these more intimate pieces presented in this recital.

    Jean-Pierre Armengaud is in the midst of a planned three-volume survey of the composer’s piano music.  The recordings appear to have begun back in 2006 and wrapped up sometime in 2012 by the information included on the present release.  The bulk of this album was recorded in the earlier date.  The program is carefully chosen from Roussel’s mature period in the first two decades of the 20th Century.  The most substantial work is a 21-minute set of incidental music for the Symbolist work Le Marchand de sable qui passé, Op. 13 (1908) which receives a world premiere in its piano version.  The work certainly shows the chromatic lessons and styles of Wagner and Debussy it helps set the tone for the traditional and expressionistic approaches that are often hallmarks of Roussel’s music.  The opening piece is a Sonatine, Op, 16 composed four years later and showing the more atmospheric style of the composer but also showing signs of the shift to abstract classical forms.  There are some of those flashes of registral technique that sounds very much like Debussy or Ravel, but the tone is a bit darker and one tends to feel more traditional harmonic shifts better.  This is a denser texture than one might find in Ravel and leans more to modernist trends of the period.  The third work is a set of three pieces (Op. 49) dedicated to the great Robert Casadesus and showing how Roussel incorporated jazzy phrasing and a new rhythmic intensity to his music by 1933 where some may hear a bit of Poulenc to come.  The accents and syncopations in the final movement are especially fascinating showing that French interest in Jazz.

    The remainder of the disc features a variety of piano miniatures composed between 1904 (”Conte a la poupee”) and 1934 (“Prelude and Fugue”).  The most recent work takes Bach’s name as the subject for its fugue and is preceded by a prelude, the last piano work Roussel composed.  Repetition plays an important role both in terms of rhythm and frequency in this rather unusual prelude filled with ostinato and rapid passagework.  The fugue itself also exhibits some composition slight of hand related to intervals and their inversions.  From 1919, “Doute” is one of those post WWI works that feels set in an uncertain world whose future is equally unstable.  This is followed by another Neo-Baroque work, the “Petit Canon perpetual” from 1912.  Revisiting his love of Debussy, “L’Accueil des Muses” (1920) was part of an issue of works commissioned by La Revue musicale for its Tombeau de Debussy supplement.  A transcription of a guitar work for the great Segovia bears his name in this 1925 work with bolero rhythms.  Finally, the disc closes with a gentle lullaby which also includes a brief canon.

    Armengaud has a long discography surveying French piano literature of the late 19th and early 20th Century.  He has even written an important biography on Satie.  He makes a convincing case for Roussel’s piano music and is able to help navigate the shifts from 19th Century Romanticism and Impressionism into Modernist and Expressionist flavors.  The musical soup of Wagner, Debussy, Ravel, D’Indy, and Franck all were part of the world that Roussel lived in and his music an resulting unique style is well worth the time of music lovers of 20th Century works.  While Roussel’s orchestral music remains some of the finer examples of his art, this collection of pieces is a worth addition for those interested in further exploring his music and bodes very well for the next two to come.  The more formal canon and fugue works are especially interesting historically while the larger pieces provide interesting windows into Roussel’s development as a composer.