 Grâce à l’action méritoire de l’altiste Marcin Murawski on redécouvre l’œuvre d’Edward Swan Hennessy si injustement oubliée. Ce compositeur imaginatif, aux inspirations culturelles multiples (américaine, irlandaise, française, polonaise…) a composé de nombreuses pièces de musique de chambre faisant principalement référence à ses racines irlandaises, son amour pour la musique polonaise (dont sa femme était originaire) et bien-sûr Chopin. Marcin Murawski qui a déjà consacré plusieurs disques à Hennessy nous propose ici des œuvres originales pour alto et piano, mais aussi des transcriptions d’œuvres écrites à l’origine pour violon ou violoncelle. Celles-ci sont entrecoupées par de courtes pièces pour piano où l’ombre de Chopin transparait à chaque mesure (comme le dyptique Mazurka/Polonaise, ou cette étude volubile rappelant le troisième Prélude opus 28). Hennessy déploie tout au long de ce disque attachant de magnifiques mélodies aux harmonies délicates et aux rythmes parfois très complexes (Etude). A plusieurs reprises il nous fait voyager dans son Irlande idéalisée. Hanna Holeksa et Marcin Murawski forment un parfait duo même si parfois on peut reprocher (seul léger bémol à ce disque) une certaine verdeur dans la sonorité de l’alto. (Jean-Noël Regnier) Edward Swan Hennessy 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, Hennessy’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...
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