Tharaud Four

“This was something I’d had in mind for a long time…to put together an album for the sheer pleasure of it, in collaboration with dear friends and paying tribute to the wonders of the piano duet repertoire.” – Alexandre Tharaud

Alexandre Tharaud follows his dazzling album of Scarlatti sonatas with another fusion of modern and historically informed performance styles. Joining him in this new collection of Bach keyboard concertos is the dynamic period-instrument ensemble Les Violons du Roy, under its director Bernard Labadie.

One might be forgiven for initially thinking that this recital featuring works for cello and piano by Franz Schubert, Anton Webern, and Alban Berg was, well, a stunt. After all, aside from their birth in the city of Vienna, what do the three composers have in common? Schubert was the quintessential master of lyrical Austro-German romanticism, while Webern and Berg were two of the three most reviled masters of atonal Austro-German expressionism – the third, of course, was Arnold Schoenberg – and one might think they'd be an impossible coupling.

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."

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.

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.

Poulenc - Complete Chamber Music, Vol.4 - Alexandre Tharaud et al. (2000) {Naxos 8.553614}
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© 2000 Naxos / HNH International | 8.553614
Classical / Early Modern / Early 20th Century / Chamber Music

Naxos’ first-rate edition of Poulenc’s complete chamber music continues with this very fine collection of shorter pieces and song cycles for voice and small ensemble. Baritone Franck Leguérinel turns in a smashing performance of Le Bal masqué from its manic opening Air de bravoure to the hysterical falsetto antics in the closing Caprice. He’s equally fine in Le Bestiaire, but the cruel vocal line and harmonic acerbities of the Max Jacob songs prove less congenial, though he’s no less stylistically assured.