Schumann Lise De La Salle

Four years after her boundary\-breaking album Bach Unlimited, pianist Lise de la Salle presents an extremely personal odyssey inspired by her love of the dance and her fascination with the period 1850 to 1950. More than just a question, Lise de la Salle’s ‘when do we dance?’ is an invitation to a voyage, ‘one that explores the different ways in which dance takes possession of the body’. A voyage in time, through a whole century (1850\-1950) with the accent on modernity; a voyage over the oceans, from North America to Eastern Europe, crisscrossing Argentina, Spain, France, Hungary and Russia; a voyage to the very core of rhythm, that essential anchor point for the dance as for music in general, that enlivens the ragtimes of Gershwin and Bolcom, Bartók’s folk dances, a waltz by Saint\-Saëns and a tango by Stravinsky.

France's Naïve label has heavily promoted the career of the young pianist Lise de la Salle, who was 22 when this recording was made. Her fashion-spread good looks fit with Naïve's design concepts, and she has the ability to deliver the spontaneous, unorthodox performances the label favors. How does she fare in a field extremely crowded with Chopin recitals? Her performances certainly aren't derivative of anyone else, and this live recording from the Semperoper in Dresden (you get a one-minute track of just applause at the end) has a good deal of attention-getting flair. The standout feature of de la Salle's performance, in the four ballades at least, is her orientation toward slow tempos, inventively deployed.

Pianist Lise de la Salle has a big tone and a strong technique, but while she is surely up to the technical requirements of Prokofiev's and Shostakovich's first piano concertos, she seems out of her depth in their interpretive demands. She can pound her way through the muscular rhythms and massive sonorities in the outer movements of Prokofiev's concerto but appears immune to the lyrical poetry in the legato lines of the work's central Andante assai.

It was the age of the Lumière Brothers, Alexander Graham Bell, Karl Benz, the Wright Brothers and Louis Blériot, Marie Curie and Louis Pasteur – an age not unlike our own, marked by rapid scientific and technological development as well as intense literary, artistic and musical activity. The Belle Époque, the period between the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 and the outbreak of World War One in 1914, was a time of apparent peace and prosperity but with a darker reality of social and economic deprivation lying not far beneath its gilded surface. This era of creativity and contradiction has long fascinated Daniel Hope: “I often wish I had a time machine to go back to the salons of Paris, indeed to that entire age,” he says.