Tharaud

This album brings together world premiere recordings of three aesthetically diverse piano concertos that were written for Alexandre Tharaud. They are Left, alone by the Dane Hans Abrahamsen (b. 1952), Future is a faded song by the Frenchman Gérard Pesson (b.1958) and Kuleshov by the Argentian-born Frenchman Oscar Strasnoy (b.1970). Strasnoy has said that his concerto was “inspired by Alexandre Tharaud’s unique and inimitable phrasing and clarity of playing.” No doubt those words could apply to all three works on the album.

The biggest surprise on this wonderfully exuberant and exhilarating disc comes with the very first notes: the piano tone is rich and full, worlds away from the slightly distant, musical-box tone that is often thought appropriate for recordings of Domenico Scarlatti's sonatas on a modern concert grand. But as the soundworld suggests, Tharaud is totally unapologetic about playing these pieces – all originally composed for harpsichord even though the earliest fortepianos were in circulation in Scarlatti's time – on a piano. In the sleevenotes, Tharaud says that of the four baroque keyboard composers that he has recorded so far – Bach, Couperin, Rameau and now Scarlatti – it's the last whose music is most suited to this treatment. His selection of sonatas is chosen for maximum variety, with a group in which the Spanish inflections of flamenco and folk music can be heard, others in which he gets a chance to show some dazzling technique, alongside those in which the playfulness is replaced by profound introspection.

Alexandre Tharaud pays tribute to composers associated with the courts of the French kings Louis XIV, XV and XVI. Lully, Rameau, Charpentier and François Couperin stand beside lesser-known masters: d’Anglebert, Forqueray, Royer, Duphly and Balbastre. “I’ve always been attracted by French music of this period,” says Tharaud, adding that when he plays the album’s initial Rameau prelude, “It’s like being alone at Versailles, opening the doors and entering those huge, imposing rooms.”

World premiere recordings as well as relaxing favourites (including the famous Gymnopedie No. 1) from France's chicest, quirkiest composer. Alexandre Tharaud is renowned as an expert in French chamber music. Features acclaimed violinist Isabelle Faust. Beautifully packaged 2-CD set with access to downloads of extra bonus tracks. 'My aim in these two discs has been to offer the richest possible panorama of Satie's piano and chamber music, spanning his whole lifetime. Immersed in the world of Satie, we were touched, and often deeply moved by the trust he shows in his interpreters."

The programme for Alexandre Tharaud's first album of Schubert comprises the four Impromptus D 899 (op 90), the six Moments musicaux and, in Tharaud's own transcription for piano, four excerpts from the stage music for Rosamunde. When Tharaud performed the Impromptus at London's Wigmore Hall in 2014, The Guardian wrote: "He got to the heart of the beauties and abysses of this music."

Twenty years after his harmonia mundi recordings, reviving the tradition of performing the great French harpsichord composers (Rameau, Couperin) on the piano, Alexandre Tharaud now joins forces with his longstanding partner Jean- Guihen Queyras to explore the works of Marin Marais… on piano and cello. Drawing on their respective experiences in Baroque music, the two artists have taken up the challenge of presenting the essence of the master of the viola da gamba: timeless, even universal.

French pianist Alexandre Tharaud is known for programs that hold together only marginally, and so it is here: Mozart's French piano student who went by the name of Mademoiselle Jeunehomme (or Jenamy or Jénomé) is associated with only one of these works, and possibly not even with that one: she is said to have given the premiere of the sprawling Piano Concerto No. 9 in E flat major, K. 271, but the work has all the hallmarks of music Mozart wrote for himself.

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.

Combining works by Debussy and Poulenc on an album may, to some, seem a bit ironic seeing as at one point, the latter railed against the music of the former. Poulenc was later to change his tune, though, and eventually became one of Debussy's most ardent admirers. The two were greatly responsible for a new direction in French music, which, ironically, required both of them to look to composers of the past for inspiration.