Dukas: La plainte, au loin, du faune...

An audiophile recording of some of Debussy’s favourite piano pieces plus rare and unusual works by admirers of his musical idiom. Carlo Grante is one of today’s most active and popular recording pianists and his concert repertoire is one of the largest among contemporary pianists.

To kick off Fuga Libera’s Debussy year, Jan Michiels has conceived a superb and generous programme to honour the "ultima verba" for piano which Debussy composed during the First World War, and the most significant fragments of the collective tribute rendered to him by some of the masters he had influenced in La Revue musicale of 1920. Apposing his own signature to the cd booklet, Jan Michiels invites us to listen to his wonderful Erard grand piano.

His selection does full justice to the quality of these works which, though less popular than the Préludes and some of the composer’s earlier works, lack nothing in terms of inspiration and insight into the future. The interpolation in the Études – rendered here in full – of the pages by Dukas, Bartók, Roussel, de Falla and Stravinski and the scattered pages signed "Claude Debussy, French composer" between 1914 and 1917, are here particularly compelling: what better tribute could we give this composer on the dawn of the 150th anniversary of his birth?

Paul Dukas (1865-1935) was one of music`s great enigmas. After studying at the Paris Conservatoire, he went in to the army, leaving in 1891. After the army he composed his large and impressive Symphony in C, and Polyeucte. His style in these works reveals an impressive knowledge of Beethoven and Schumann, with traces of Lalo, Bizet and Saint-Saens.

His most famous work, the L’apprenti sorcier ( included on these CDs in its 2 piano version) followed, together with the ballet La Peri. However, Dukas was incredibly self critical, and he destroyed much of his work. Luckily, like those works mentioned above some of the piano music survived.

The huge piano sonata of 1901 with its indebtedness to Beethoven’s op110 and 111 sonatas is a very impressive work. Debussy rated it as equal to Beethoven in its conception. The Variations, Interlude and Finale after Rameau may well be a result of Dukas editing Les Indes Galante.

Dukas contributed to a collection of works published as ‘Le Tombeau de Claude Debussy’ with other composers – Ravel, Stravinsky, Satie, Malipiero, and Bartok. Upon his own death, Schmitt, Falla, Pierne, Ropartz, Rodrigo, Krein, Messiaen, Aubin and Barraine all produced short works in his memory. Finally, as well as a short tribute to Papa Haydn, this 2CD set contains the world premiere recording of the Allegro pour Monsieur Serge Koussewitzky.

Still rarely recorded repertoire, this set will be of interest to those interested in French music of this period.

The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra focused extensively on Messiaen in its 2007-8 season. A major musical figure of the 20th-century, Messiaen (1908-1992) created an entirely unique musical oeuvre in which such divergent elements as divinity, as it relates to Catholicism and other doctrines, ornithology and the synaesthetic perception of sound as colour are all interconnected with his innovative rhythmic and harmonic musical language and tonal organisation. As a thinker and teacher, Messiaen carried out groundbreaking work in music during the second half of the century, but his work as a composer has remained unsurpassed. During this special season, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra programmed works not only by Messiaen himself, but also compositions by his musical predecessors, students and disciples, including three premières of works commissioned by the RCO: Geert van Keulen's orchestration of Paul Dukas's La plainte, au loin, du faune…, Marc-André Dalbavie's La source d'un regard (The Source of a Look) and Robert Zuidam's Adam Interludes.

With this second release in the Horizon CD series, dedicated to contemporary repertoire, RCO Live has captured this resounding homage to Olivier Messiaen in superb five-channel stereo.