Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809-1847)
Ouverture de concert "La Fée Mélusine", op. 32
Musique de scène "Le Songe d'une nuit d'été", op. 61

DuoKeira

Michela Chiara Borghese, piano
Sabrina De Carlo, piano

Joli programme et écoute passionnante : deux transcriptions réalisées par Mendelssohn lui-même, dont celle de La Belle Mélusine enregistrée pour la première fois. Quant à celle du Songe, la version jouée est un hybride de 2 révisions parues en 2001 : la Leipziger Ausgabe et l’édition Mineola. Ces versions pianistiques s’écartent de l’essence sonore des originaux : impossible pour le compositeur de rendre le méticuleux travail d’articulation des groupes d’instruments par lequel il allège son orchestre… Je trouve le résultat obtenu plus romantique et moins léger, moins « elfique » si on veut. Il faut dire que le choix d’un Steinway au timbre très riche mais un peu lourd renforce cette impression. Cela convient magnifiquement au motif liquide de la Belle Mélusine (comme le rappelle la notice, on croit entendre l’entame de l’Or du Rhin), ou au « Lied mit Chor » du Songe. Mais est-ce que les passages plus légers (dont le Scherzo, la Marche des Elfes…) et le jeu des interprètes n’auraient pas bénéficié d’un son plus clair et s’éteignant plus vite (Yamaha, Fazioli) ? DuoKeira est en effet digne d’éloges : les deux pianistes ne font qu’une, l’homogénéité de leurs touchers m’a parue magistrale, la variété des attaques et la différenciation des épisodes au sein de chaque pièce sont très réussies. Un plaisir. (Olivier Eterradossi)

The piano duet was an opportunity to have fun and make music with friends for Mendelssohn as it was for many other 19th-century composers, who wrote pieces that far transcended their domestic origins and often arranged their larger-scale works for the medium so that it could be appreciated by listeners where full orchestral performances were much harder to come by. In 1844 Mendelssohn made his own piano-duet arrangement of the Incidental music he had composed to accompany a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Potsdam two years earlier, a suite which itself drew on the precociously immortal Overture he had composed as a 16-year-old. The magical purity of the orchestral score is here translated into a limpid graininess which renders each phrase even more crystalline than in the symphonic version, especially in its most rapid passages. The relationship between the two versions might be likened to that between a sketch and a painting, though with no certainty as to which had been composed first. A comparison of the full-colour orchestral score with the ‘black and white’ of the piano-duet arrangement reveals how the timbres of Mendelssohn’s orchestral imagination stem from the conceptual outlines and regular forms first devised on a keyboard. Thus the arrangement has plenty to reveal about the score to even to listeners intimately familiar with the fully scored original. Having given the triumphant premiere of the overture to The Fair Melusine in Leipzig in 1836, Mendelssohn then arranged it for piano duet the same year. Again, every phrase of the symphonic original resounds with greater emphasis: the yielding swell of the waves is evoked by a delicacy of touch rendered almost liquid by brushing of the damper pedal. With this album the Italian DuoKeira makes a most promising debut on Brilliant Classics. Michela Chiara Borghese and Sabrina De Carlo have played together since 2008, giving concerts in prestigious venues such as Carnegie Hall and in Paris at the invitation of UNESCO; in 2017 they were among the winners of the Global Music Awards for their performance of Samuel Barber’s Souvenirs.