Alexandre Tharaud

Alexandre Tharaud has always defied categorization—a rare musician who dazzles equally in J.S. Bach as he does in The Beach Boys, and everything in between. Pieced together from recordings made over 30 years, this collection finds Tharaud steering us on a four-hour journey through some of the piano’s greatest solo works, thrilling and beautiful concerto movements, and an array of ravishing discoveries including the charming, post-Impressionist worlds of French composers Paul Le Flem and Jean Wiener. Elsewhere, the variety on display is breathtaking, the programming daring as Tharaud moves seamlessly from Satie to Bach, Fauré to Gershwin, even Morricone to Poulenc. It’s a bold move to place Debussy’s sumptuous “Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune” after the crispness of Mozart’s “Alla Turca", for instance, but the contrast is spellbinding—as is every moment of this extraordinary piano treasury.

It’s puzzling that many of the inventive, magical harpsichord pieces that Alexandre Tharaud plays here have never been recorded on the piano before. Perhaps, in our modern era, we’ve become too bound by the “rules” of historical performance—which would be a shame, because the French composers of the 17th and 18th centuries, all of whom here served at one time or another at the Court of Versailles, wrote enchanting, sophisticated keyboard music. Just listen to the delicate filigree of Rameau’s ornamented “Le Rappel des oiseaux,” Royer’s strikingly modern “La Marche des Scythes,” and the stately simplicity of D’Anglebert’s “Sarabande”—and marvel at how Tharaud’s playing brings washes of dazzling color and depth of sound to these centuries-old scores.