Marcel Proust’s great novel “In Search of Lost Time” is full of reminiscences and allusions to the music of the Parisian salons of the fin de siècle. Shani Diluka, a French pianist of Sri Lankan origin, plunges into this world on “The Proust Album” (Warner Classics) with great freedom of association. It starts with the rarely played E major piano concerto by Reynaldo Hahn, the writer’s long-time friend and lover, which was only written eight years after Proust’s death. With the Orchester de chambre de Paris under Hervé Niquet, Diluka presents this music as a surprise bag of dreamlike connected moods, virtuoso moods and sound stimuli.
The path into the imagined Proustian cosmos leads through pieces by Jules Massenet, César Franck and Debussy to Strauss and Wagner. Natalie Dessay’s ethereal soprano and the flute-like singing tone of the violinist Pierre Fouchenneret fit perfectly into Diluka’s concept of an intimate beauty of the game, which, despite its sublime refinement, never slips into the emotional. One can get lost in the famous Madeleine episode, which the Comédie Française actor Guillaume Gallienne reads in a wonderfully melodic manner about the sounds of Hahn’s piano piece “Rêveries du Prince Églantine”.
It was actually Bartók’s “seventh string quartet”, the composer György Kurtág once joked about the 1st quartet composed by his compatriot György Ligeti in 1953-54. The 30-year-old Ligeti composed it before he fled Hungary in 1956, in complete isolation from the western avant-garde. The young French quartet Quatuor Hanson now makes the line of tradition audible in his high-contrast, plastic play, which leads from the folkloristically inspired musical language in Bartók’s 2nd String Quartet to Ligeti’s first, the “Métamorphoses nocturnes”. On the one hand. In rapidly changing textures, flageolet webs and spooky Clair-Obscur effects, elements of that illusionistic sound surface composition are already heralded here, which Ligeti realized for the first time in his orchestral work “Atmosphères” in 1961 and thus found his own musical language. Bartók’s second and Ligeti’s first quartet combine the CD under the slightly bizarre title “Not all Cats are gray” (Aparté) with Henri Dutilleux’s “Ainsi la nuit” for string quartet. The Quatuor Hanson lets Dutilleux ‘music shimmer and float impressionistically with artful fleetingness and thus offers an interesting alternative to the more recent, more concise recording of the Quatuor Ébène.
The musicians of the Almond ring quartets on the French composer and temporary director of the Paris Conservatory Jean Rivier (1896-1987). His extensive oeuvre of more than 200 works – including eight symphonies and an opera – is practically unknown in this country. At least the two string quartets presented by the Mandelring Quartet on their new album “Debussy & Jean Rivier” (Audite) are worth the discovery. Number one, composed in 1924 while Rivier’s studies were delayed due to the war, is stylistically unmistakable in the tradition of Debussy’s G minor quartet, written a good twenty years earlier, with which it is combined on the CD. However, with its broad spectrum of expression, its independent tone and the passionate flow of the form, which is already well developed in terms of craftsmanship, it goes far beyond an academic epigonism. The 2nd Quartet, composed in 1940 and found by Mandelring cellist Bernhard Schmidt in the Paris National Gallery, sounds completely different, more harsh, bitter and full of dissonance. Rivier seems to have been one of those serious but inconspicuous artists beyond all glamor and all fashions who have simply been forgotten for their modesty and honesty. He has passionate lawyers in the musicians of the Mandelring Quartet.
The Swiss pianist Romain Nosbaum wanted to combine music by Bach, Ravel and John Cage. He called his new CD “Reflections” (Ars Production), which is far from being a concept album just because of the unusual combination. What the works – Bach’s Partita VI in E minor, Ravel’s piano cycle “Miroirs” and Cage’s piano piece “In a Landscape”, composed in 1948 as an homage to Erik Satie based on a choreography by Louise Lippold – have in common is that they can be found in everyone reflect differently, explains Nosbaum his idea. Whether and how the pieces actually communicate subliminally with one another or contrast with one another seems completely secondary in view of his crystal clear, deeply musical interpretations. You speak for yourself with pleasant directness.