 Le compositeur américain Edward Swan Hennessy était d’origine irlandaise. Il vécut essentiellement à Paris. Il se passionna pour la culture et la musique celte, les folklores en général et le jazz qui se répandit progressivement en Europe, au lendemain de la Première Guerre mondiale. Nombres de ses pièces portent des titres évocateurs avec les mots “celtique”, “irlandaise”, “gaélique”. Marcin Murawski a transcrit pour alto plusieurs d’entre elles. Cela a pour effet d’ouvrir les possibilités expressives et surtout narratives des œuvres. En effet, l’alto est, par tradition, l’instrument des confidences, le “barde” comme se décrivait, d’ailleurs, le compositeur. Les morceaux sont charmants et d’une harmonie parfois délicate à l’instar du cycle Au village qui est dédié à Max Reger. Les influences de Debussy et de Fauré sont perceptibles. De même, le jazz dans l’une des partitions éponyme, correspond davantage à ce que l’on nomme aujourd’hui le ragtime. Plus remarquables encore sont les sept Valses Caprices teintées d’un humour bienveillant (valse rustique, canaille, distraite, boiteuse, érotique). Marcin Murawski et Anna Starzec-Makandasis interprètent ce programme avec beaucoup de tendresse et de saveur. Une jolie découverte. (Jean Dandrésy) Edward Swan Henessy was an Irish-American composer and pianist, who spent most of his life in Paris, and whose greatest fascination was Celtic music. He spent his youth in Chicago, finished his musical studies in Stuttgart, later moved to London to finally settle for good in Paris in 1903. It’s where he married, for the second time, Klara Przybyszewska, whose mother was the cousin of poet and writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski. His works contain influences of German romanticism, impressionism, jazz as well as program and folk music inspired by nature and industry. One of his early critics wrote: ‘He was a humourist with great gusto, whose humour drew from observation and invention, fantasy and psychology’. Since the beginning of the 20th century, Henessy’s works focused almost exclusively on integrating musical inspirations from Ireland, Scotland and Brittany. In the 1920s he wrote most of his chamber works, including duets, trios and quartets, piano pieces and series of songs with the accompaniment of the piano. Many of those works, whose titles contain terms such as ‘celtique’, ‘gaélique’ or ‘irlandais’, were inspired by traditional folk melodies and dances. In one of his letters from 1923, Hennessy wrote ‘…it was my love for Ireland that has inspired my works’. Thus, he quickly earned the reputation of a ‘Celtic’ composer, to the point that his previous works became nearly entirely forgotten, and he himself was considered ‘Ireland’s bard’, who until his last days was appreciated by the critics and audiences.
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