 En une heure et quart de temps, voici l’intégrale de l’œuvre pour piano interprétée pas Vincenzo Maltempo. Il s’agit des pièces originales, ce qui exclut les transcriptions comme "L’Apprenti Sorcier". L’œuvre de Dukas est dominée par l’immense Sonate qui, à elle seule, fait plus de la moitié de la durée de la musique pour piano du compositeur ! On s’interroge toujours sur le peu d’entrain de la plupart des pianistes pour enregistrer cette partition majeure du répertoire… En effet, elle tisse une sorte de lien entre Beethoven, Franck et la musique de la première moitié du 20e siècle. L’interprète dose parfaitement les équilibres de cette écriture monumentale, d’une très grande difficulté technique notamment en raison de la virtuosité requise dans le troisième mouvement. Hommage à Rameau, les Variations jouent entre le néoclassicisme et les ombres de l’écriture postromantique. Vincenzo Maltempo traduit magnifiquement les multiples allusions de cette musique qui s’achève triomphalement, en pleine lumière. Le Prélude et la Plainte qui referment l’album sont deux autres joyaux qu’il faut avoir entendus. Un seul regret dans cette édition : que le livret ne soit uniquement qu’en anglais, ce qui est pour le moins regrettable dans un tel programme. (Jean Dandrésy) A new recording of all the major works for piano by a foundational figure in French music of the early 20th century. Born in 1865, Dukas could have (and probably did) compose a good deal literally and stylistically in the 19th century, but his fastidious craftsmanship and self-criticism saw him burn far more music than he allowed to survive. All of a sudden, on the turn of the new century, he wrote two large-scale works which bring together a reverence for the recent and long-gone past with bold new thinking of how to write for the piano. Begun in 1899, the Variations take an innocent dance theme by Rameau and subject it to a dazzling sequence of treatments coloured by strict counterpoint, dreamy rhapsody and a Lisztian scale of piano writing. Even more ambitious and contrapuntal in its workings is the 40-minute Piano Sonata which has long been regarded as a summit of fin-de-siècle piano writing. The Sonata has often been compared to Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata for its colossal dimensions, its structural complexities and its tightrope virtuoso writing. Dukas himself later discussed its journey in terms of a symbolic victory over ‘the beast within’, and ‘the triumph of Apollo over the Pythian serpent’. Vincenzo Maltempo follows in the footsteps of virtuosos such as Michel Ponti and Marc-André Hamelin, and shows himself equipped for the task, having already accumulated a critically acclaimed catalogue of hyper-virtuoso repertoire on Piano Classics, including five albums of Alkan, the Hungarian Rhapsodies of Liszt and the complete Sonatas of Scriabin. He possesses the virtuosity to burn which this music demands, but also the poetic sensibility to bring the most subtle nuances of colour to bear on two miniatures from much later in Dukas’s career, a Prélude in memory of Haydn and a deeply felt tribute to the memory of Debussy which makes haunting reference to the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune. ‘Maltempo plays [Alkan’s Op 39] Concerto splendidly. He brings welcome lightness and rhythmic kick to the Allegretto Alla Barbaresca finale, while the central slow movement stands out for the pianist’s long singing lines and pulverizing bass notes at the climaxes.’ Classics Today (Alkan, PCL0061)
|
Catalog 
