Gouttes D'eau Sur Pierres Brûlantes (2000)

L'heure est (déjà) au sixième album pour Debout Sur Le Zinc. Baptisé La Fuite en Avant et produit par Jean-Louis Piérot, celui-ci se démarque du rock alternatif francophone comme de la variété et de la chanson hexagonale. La Fuite en Avant, ce sont douze airs où les femmes sont omniprésentes, soit à travers le chant, dans lequel perce une fragilité, et une mélancolie récurrentes qui font considérer cela, ou plus assurément dans les histoires du quotidien qui tue à petit feu l'homme qui se demande qui il est et comment il en est arrivé là.

The Catalan composer Frederic Mompou (1893-1987) is hardly a household word (though Segovia performed his guitar pieces), probably because, unlike other Spanish composers of folkloric bent like de Falla, Albeniz and Granados he never wrote for the stage, which can be the ticket to immortality. But working in small forms doesn't make him a lightweight; miniatures don't lack drama or emotional interest – just look at what Chopin, Faurè and Schubert did. This new CD of Mompou's solo piano music joins a relatively select few by Europeans like Laurent Martin, Gustavo Romero, Stephen Hough, Alicia de Laroccha, and there's even one by the composer himself. This outing, by young Spanish pianist Jordi Masó, certainly seems to have captured Mompou's very special poetry.

Born in New York in 1946, Swiss-American lutenist Hopkinson Smith graduated from Harvard with Honors in Music in 1972. His instrumental studies took him to Europe where he worked with Emilio Pujol, a great pedagogue in the highest Catalan artistic tradition, and with the Swiss lutenist, Eugen Dombois, whose sense of organic unity between performer, instrument, and historical period has had lasting effects on him. He has been involved in numerous chamber music projects and was one of the founding members of the ensemble Hespèrion XX. Since the mid-80’s, he has focused almost exclusively on the solo repertoires for early plucked instrument, producing a series of prize-winning recordings for Astrée and Naïve, which feature Spanish music for vihuela and baroque guitar, French lute music of the Renaissance and baroque, English and Italian music of the 16th early 17th century and music from the German high baroque.

Like Coralie Clément, Keren Ann may not have the widest range, but she makes the most of it. Her vocals are light, delicate, and pretty, as if she has found a way to combine talking, whispering, and singing into one fluid approach (and as if she has listened to a few Astrud Gilberto albums in her time). La Biographie de Luka Philipsen was the French singer/songwriter's debut and many of the songs were co-written with longtime associate Benjamin Biolay (Clément's older brother).

Adolf von Henselt’s music is not well known today outside piano circles. His Piano Trio Op. 24, dedicated to Franz Liszt, is one of the few chamber works he created, and it bears more signs of the performer’s career he left behind than of the influential pedagogue he became. If Henselt’s writing is a little over-the-top in places, the playing on this recording is even more so. The ensemble is occasionally on the heavy side, and MDG’s sound is so direct and open that the performers’ stresses are exaggerated even further. This is evident, for instance, in the closing bars of the first movement exposition and in much of the following development section.

If you want a representative sample of Igor Kipnis’ Bach, start with the introductory toccata to the E minor Partita (No. 6). You get little of the music’s introspective undertones, but Kipnis’ subtle registration changes, resourceful ornamentation, and rhythmic extroversion proves quite insidious. Some of Kipnis’ textual emendations will surprise you, such as his duple-meter reading of the Fifth Partita’s Allemanda. Only on the repeats does Kipnis reinstate the middle notes of the right hand triplet groupings.