Charles Burney (1726-1814)
Sonates pour piano à 4 mains, livre 1
Sonates pour piano à 4 mains, livre 2

Anna Clemente, piano
Susanna Piolanti, piano

Charles Burney est connu avant tout comme musicologue, grand voyageur et connaisseur émérite de toute l'Europe musicale de son époque. Son grand œuvre "A General History of Music" a largement contribué à fonder la musicologie moderne. Il fut pourtant un compositeur apprécié en Angleterre. La première série des Sonates enregistrées ici constituent les premières œuvres publiées pour un piano à quatre mains. Construites en deux mouvements lent/rapide, elles empruntent autant aux modèles baroques qu'au classicisme naissant. Les mouvements lents ont un caractère improvisé tandis que les allegros adoptent des dissonances joyeuses et des rythmes dansants. Le piano-forte utilisé ici, un instrument anglais de 1800, permet aux pianistes de trouver des sonorités proches des ensembles de luths typiques des danses baroques. Après le succès du premier cahier, Burney publie deux ans plus tard un second cycle de quatre Sonates. Toujours écrites en deux mouvements, elles sont pourtant plus ambitieuses, coulées dans les formes classiques. Ces pièces permettent de resituer Burney dans l'histoire de la musique anglaise, à un moment de transition entre le baroque hérité d'Italie (Métastase dont il fut le biographe) et le jeune Mozart qu'il avait croisé à Bologne quelques années auparavant. (Thomas Herreng)

Here’s a release of rare repertoire sure to intrigue and delight anyone with more than a passing interest in 18th-century musical culture. The English scholar, musician and inveterate traveller, observer and collector Charles Burney is known for many things – fine taste, a ready wit and a capacious address book principal among them – but his own compositions have so far received almost no attention. Burney’s diaries make for immensely entertaining reading. In them may be relished vivid accounts of musical circles and activities in Italian, German, Dutch, French and English cities, and mention is made of Handel, Metastasio, Sammartini, Mozart, C.P.E. Bach and many others. However, Burney’s musical personality was deeper and more complex than reading his diaries might lead one to believe. For the fact is that he was not only a ‘musicologist’, but also a practising musician active as a composer, a professional organist, harpsichordist and violinist. Burney’s encyclopedic knowledge and breadth of sympathy are evident in the two volumes of the Four Sonatas or Duets for two performers on one Pianoforte or Harpsichord, which he published at his own expense in London in 1777. In fact the novelty of the sonatas was a commercially astute decision, for although they are in essence conceived for solo piano, there was at the time no other published music for the increasingly popular form of duet music at a single keyboard. Each sonata has two movements: a slow and expressive introduction leads to a lively Allegro, though the second sonata of the second volume reverses this order, and the final sonata begins with an elaborate Andantino which overshadows the concluding Rondo. Burney also took care to exploit the dynamic possibilities of the hammer-action instruments which were gradually displacing the harpsichord; Anna Clemente & Susanna Piolanti perform the sonatas on a square, English model fortepiano dating from 1800: the booklet includes both photographs of the instrument and an invaluable introduction to Burney the composer.