Karol Szymanowski was never a concert virtuoso but knew the piano
inside out, writing music that, despite its often complex textures, is
always beautifully laid out for the hands. It has never caught the
imagination of the general public, with perhaps the exception of the
dolorously lovely B flat Étude from Op 4, clearly modelled on Chopin’s B
minor Prelude. This early set was composed between 1900 and 1902, when
Scriabin was a major influence, though the bitonal opening of the last
of the four hints at wrhat was to come. The distance travelled can be
measured by the second set of (12) Études from 1916, dedicated to Alfred
Cortot: epigrammatic (none lasts more than two minutes), tonally
enigmatic, extremely difficult and played as a sequence without break.
The three Métopes
from 1915 (a metope here is a sculptured panel in a Doric
frieze)—‘L’île des Sirenes’, ‘Calypso’ and ‘Nausicaa’—recall ‘the
leavening, salutary influence of Ravel’s and Debussy’s weightless,
diaphanous textures’ (to quote Francis Pott in his booklet-note) and
rely ‘upon a performer of fastidious polyphonic instincts and acute
subtlety’. The studied spontaneity of the three Masques
(1915-16)—‘Shéhérazade’, ‘Tantris le Bouffon’ and ‘La Sérénade de Don
Juan’—again defy structural analysis, their titles having no immediately
obvious connection with the music.
But if I personally find it
hard to respond positively to these elusive tone-poems, one can have no
reservations about Cédric Tiberghien’s playing throughout this absorbing
disc.
His quite extraordinary tonal palette and acute
observation of the composer’s fastidious notation are beyond reproach, a
masterclass in refined virtuosity. (Jeremy Nicholas / Gramophone)
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