Lucas Debargue Scarlatti, 52 Sonaten

"Scarlatti" is the new album from the internationally renowned pianist Lucas Debargue. This stunning new album features 52 beautiful sonatas by Scarlatti—often considered ne of the most influential composers of the Baroque era. Debargue started taking piano lessons at the age of 11. At the 2015 International Tchaikovsky Competition , Debargue was awarded the coveted Moscow Music Critic’s Prize. Debargue has performed at numerous prestigious music venues including the Royal Festival Hall, Wigmore Hall, the Berlin Philharmonic hall , Carnegie Hall and the Concertgebouw. Debargue has won many awards including the highly regarded Echo Klassik award in 2017.

French pianist Lucas Debargue began studying the piano seriously only as an adult, and he has made news with daring feats like appearing with an orchestra for the first time in the finals of the Tchaikovsky Competition. He's not so much an enfant terrible as a young pianist with an instinct for running counter to trends in a productive way, and those watching him may find this Sony Classical release a good place to start. Here he offers unusual interpretations of fairly common sonatas by Schubert, and an unusual work, the Piano Sonata No. 2 in A major, Op. 21, of Karol Szymanowski.

For his latest release on Sony Classical, pianist Lucas Debargue turns to one of the unsung treasuries of the piano repertoire - the works of Gabriel Fauré. In a remarkable undertaking, Debargue has recorded every note of his compatriot’s piano music - all on a newly designed piano rarely heard on record until now. For this recording, Debargue has reexamined Fauré’s entire output for piano, starting from the beginning. Across 4 CDs, he ‘retraces the journey that the composer had taken from his earliest works for the piano to his last contribution to the medium.’ Recording it, reports the pianist, has ‘transformed my life both as a person and as a musician.’

The French pianist Lucas Debargue was a Tchaikovsky Competition sensation in 2015 (although he did not win), and this studio debut gives you a good idea of what the fuss was about. Debargue offers the French tradition in all its calmly urbane glory. You might like various aspects of this release: the unapologetically pianistic but flawlessly elegant Bach Toccata, the Medtner Sonata in F minor, Op. 5. You might sample one of the movements of the latter, inasmuch as the preponderance of recordings of Medtner's solo piano music tends to favor the thunder and lightning of Marc-André Hamelin, for example.