Bertrand Chamayou

Young piano virtuosos used to make their recording debuts with flashy discs of Chopin's etudes or Liszt's rhapsodies. More recently, they've begun to make their debuts with thoughtful discs of Schumann's fantasias or Brahms' variations. But with this 2008 Naïve disc, young French virtuoso Bertrand Chamayou makes his debut with surprise! an all-Mendelssohn program. This change is, to say the least, courageous. Not only is the German composer's piano music still relatively rarely represented on disc, but it is considered by critics to be less significant than the piano music of his contemporaries.

The title of this album evokes not only the life-long journey of all these musicians, but also a lasting friendship between soprano Barbara Hannigan and the Emerson String Quartet. One of the greatest string quartets of the last four decades, the Emersons will disband in October 2023. Barbara and the Emersons were determined to record Schoenberg's Quartet No. 2 since they started performing the work together in 2015.

"A giant fresco, a kind of odyssey," is Bertrand Chamayou's description of Olivier Messiaen's piano masterwork, Vingt Regards sur L'Enfant-Jésus. Written in 1944, it is a monumental, mystical and iridescent sequence of 20 gazes or contemplations on the infant Jesus. Messiaen once wrote that "The drama of my life is that I have written religious music for an audience that has no faith." Bertrand Chamayou feels that the Vingt Regards "is a mystical rather than a religious experience… It arouses the same kind of awe as walking into a magnificent cathedral or seeing a glorious sunset. You feel that time stops." Chamayou first played the work in 2008, Messiaen's centenary year, but it has been part of his life since he was nine years old.

For her new double-album Sol Gabetta teams up with excellent French pianist Betrand Chamayou, with whom she plays sold out concerts in major concert halls. The album features Mendelssohn's complete works for cello and piano and new, short pieces written by famous contemporary composers Wolfgang Rihm, Heinz Holliger, Francisco Coll and Jörg Widman specifically for this album, all of which were inspired by Mendelssohn’s beautiful "Lied ohne Worte, Op. 109." The album was recorded at the famous new Philharmonie de Paris.

2021 marks 100 years since the death of Camille Saint-Saëns, one of the acknowledged masters of French music. Pianist Bertrand Chamayou, violinist Renaud Capuçon and cellist Edgar Moreau salute him with this album of three of his finest chamber works: the Violin Sonata No 1, Cello Sonata No 1 and Piano Trio No 2. “These are splendid works,” says Bertrand Chamayou, “but only relatively rarely performed and recorded. This is essential French Romantic chamber music and French performers of our generation have a duty to share it with audiences.”

Beyond their brilliant virtuosity and craftsmanship, Camille Saint-Saëns’s epic Piano Concerto No. 2 and irresistibly exotic No.5 (‘Egyptian’) invite listeners on a riveting and richly imaginative journey. Hailed ‘the new French prince of the piano’ (Diapason), Bertrand Chamayou also reveals a more intimate side to the great composer-pianist, exploring the hidden charm and secret sensuality of his rarely-heard etudes and solo piano miniatures.

The program for this album of Debussy's chamber music is unusual: except for the enchanting Syrinx, for solo flute, all the pieces are written in the classical chamber music forms. Only in the realm of chamber music did Debussy do this, and hearing a group of such works together on the same bill is of considerable interest. Here Debussy could not get away without modulating, but the balance among texture, harmonic field, and fixed, sonata-like forms shift in fascinating ways.

“Erik Satie and John Cage are UFOs in the world of music, because they envisioned music through a completely different prism,” says pianist Bertrand Chamayou. “They are pioneers in the sense that, for many people, they changed the very idea of what music must be.” With his album Letter(s) to Erik Satie Chamayou pays tribute to two idiosyncratic, innovative and influential composers, one born in Normandy in 1866, the other in Los Angeles in 1912. There is a strong connection between them: Cage considered Satie a source of inspiration. Satie takes pride of place on the album with such pieces as the three Gymnopédies and the seven Gnossiennes, while Cage is represented by five pieces and a work attributed to him following its rediscovery amongst the papers of his disciple James Tenney – whose musical homage to Satie also features in the programme. Chamayou recorded the album at the state-of-the-art Miraval Studios in Provence, which inspired him to take an experimental approach: “I thought we should do something a little different – and I thought of Erik Satie. This was an opportunity to get really intimate with the piano… Satie is really a special case, a strange musician unlike anyone else.”