Emmanuel Despax: Après un rêve
Signum Classics

On earlier Signum releases, pianist Emmanuel Despax tackled Chopin, Brahms, and Bach, and even issued a recording based on themes from The Sound of Music to celebrate the musical's sixtieth anniversary. For his seventh, he directs his attention to the piano repertoire of the French Belle Époque, a fitting choice for a London-based artist who was born in Paris and later regularly visited with his grandparents in the city and honed an appreciation for French culture. Testifying to the strength of that familial bond, Despax dedicated Après un rêve (After a dream) to his grandfather, Jacques Charpentreau, and further honoured him by including poems by him in the release booklet to complement the music.

It's not the first time Despax, who's given recital performances in the UK, France, Italy, Holland, Cyprus, New Zealand, and South America, has played material by a French composer, as his concerto debut include Saint-Saëns' second piano concerto. It is, however, the first time he's devoted an entire album to such material, and the results, selections of elegance and finesse executed with consummate poise, are superb. Debussy and Ravel appear, of course, the two represented by "Claire de lune" and Gaspard de la nuit, as do Fauré and, again, Saint-Saëns, in their cases Après un rêve (in Despax's own arrangement for piano) and Danse macabre. As rewarding are the pianist's renditions of Poulenc's Les Soirées de Nazelles, Cécile Chaminade's Nocturne Op.165, and Henri Duparc's Aux étoiles. Despax impresses with multiple displays of rapid fingerwork, but his artistry is more evident in slower passages where his sensitivity of touch and exquisite phrasing are captured. In these episodes, his command of the material and the authority with which it's delivered are resoundingly demonstrated. Emotion and intellect are held in magnificent balance throughout the eighty-two-minute set.

Fauré's Après un rêve is the perfect mood-setter and also affords an early opportunity to witness the nuance with which Despax handles material of such delicacy. His choices of tempo and dynamics amplify the dream-like character of the music and convey the romantic ache that's part of its essence. Changing things up, Poulenc's eleven-part Les Soirées de Nazelles, created between 1930 and 1936 at the composer's country retreat in Noizay, offers a veritable cornucopia of pianistic delights. Played with panache by Despax, “Préambule” initiates proceedings with a brash, irreverent waltz that suggests the influence of Spanish pianist Ricardo Viñes, with whom Poulenc studied (a similar impression is engendered by “Le charme enjôleur”); the precision and clarity of the pianist's exacting rendering don't go unnoticed. The colourful work advances thereafter through movements impish (“Le comble de la distinction”), wistful (“Le cœur sur la main”), exuberant (“La désinvolture et la discrétion”), crepuscular (“La suite dans les idées”), and fragile (“Le goût du malheur”), each executed by Despax with surgical attention to detail. Arriving after the declamatory majesty of the penultimate “Cadence,” “Final” caps the work with rapid flurries of notes and runs.

“Clair de lune,” the third piece of Debussy's Suite bergamasque, is the most familiar of the album's seven works, but Despax invests his performance with the same degree of care he does elsewhere. The piece sighs at his fingertips and in doing so transports us into that magical realm that Debussy's music so often inhabits. Performed in an arrangement by Franz Liszt and Vladimir Horowitz, Saint-Saëns' Danse macabre floods the album with devilish mischievousness for ten minutes. In stark contrast, Chaminade's beguiling, salon-styled Nocturne, Op. 165 radiates warmth and light in equal measure. Following it is Ravel's triptych Gaspard de la nuit, which progresses from the sparkling cascades of “Ondine” to the funereal stillness of “Le Gibet” and diabolical agitation of “Scarbo.” Whereas the latter sometimes moves at a furious clip, the slow tempo Despax opts for in “Le Gibet” reflects the kind of thoughtful circumspection he shows throughout. The glacial pace, the hush of his playing, and the delicate suspension of the notes bring into sharp relief the desolate quality of the music. At album's close, Duparc's meditative reverie Aux étoiles reinstates the gentleness of the album's quieter settings—a lovely bookend to Fauré's opener.

July 2023