Darius Milhaud (1892-1974)
Suite pour violon, clarinette et piano, op. 157b

Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
Première Rhapsodie pour clarinette et piano
Sonate pour violon et piano

Igor Stravinski (1882-1971)
Suite pour clarinette, violon et piano, extrait de "L'histoire du Soldat"

Béla Bartók (1881-1945)
"Contrasts", pour violon, clarinette et piano

Davide Bandieri, clarinette
Gyula Stuller, violon
Gerardo Vila, piano

Réunir Debussy, Bartok, Stravinski et Milhaud dans un programme musical consacré à la clarinette au violon et au piano est une belle idée qui peut se transformer en déconvenue faute de complicité musicale. C’est hélas ce que l’on ressent à l’écoute de ce disque dont les interprètes n’ont guère à offrir en partage face à des œuvres hypermédiatisées. C’est notamment le cas de la "Première rhapsodie pour clarinette et piano" de Debussy et de la "Sonate pour violon et piano". Les deux créations tardives du maître se perdent dans des couleurs désespérément éteintes et vides de sensualité. Avec "l’Histoire du soldat", Stravinski a tiré un entraînant mimodrame aux accents jazziques pour sept instruments. La "Suite pour piano, clarinette et violon" dont elle est issue, se heurte ici à un problème intempestif de vibrato de l’archet. En revanche, le caractère idiomatique de "Contrasts" de Bartok est préservé grâce à la virtuosité du violon, fantasque et léger et aux sortilèges de la clarinette. C’est finalement Darius Milhaud qui semble le mieux servi dans ce programme éclectique avec une très allègre "Suite pour violon clarinette et piano". Retrouver le chemin de compositeurs moins réputés semble plus que jamais la planche de salut pour des formations chambristes en devenir. (Jacques Potard)

A unique and scintillating collection of music for violin, clarinet and piano spinning out from the ‘Harlequin Years’ of Paris. During the first decades of the last century, Paris took over from Vienna as the centre of the art-music’s universe. Ideas and styles exploded like fireworks from the French capital, and among the first figures sending them into the wider world was Claude Debussy. His Première Rhapsodie began life as a competition piece for clarinet, first performed in 1911, and while the later orchestral version is now more commonly heard, it is instructive to revisit the composer’s original, more subtly allusive first thoughts. Seven years later, by now dying of cancer, Debussy completed the last of three works in which he returned to the traditional form of sonata which he had avoided through much of his career in favour of tone-pictures such as the Préludes and suites for piano. The Violin Sonata counts among his most concise and refined works in an output touched throughout by those qualities, demanding the greatest subtlety and passion from its interpreters. In the same year as the Première Rhapsodie, Stravinsky had scored his career-defining succès de scandale with the premiere of Le sacre du printemps, and by 1918 he was established as a darling of the Parisian avant-garde when he composed L’histoire du soldat (first performed in Lausanne; Diaghilev’s staging in Paris had to wait until 1924) for a septet of instruments and narrator. The following year he arranged five self-contained numbers from the score into a suite, further reduced for a spiky instrumental trio and featuring the marvellously sly tango as well as the Rite-like final Danse du soldat. Milhaud’s Suite and Bartók’s Contrasts date from two decades later, but they are still infused with the absinthe and lemon of 20s Parisian culture. Heard together, the five works paint a portrait of a world of dazzling colours and restless momentum, sometimes bewildered by its own precosity, taking what it wanted from old cultures and always breaking new paths.