D’INDY: Symphony for Orchestra and Piano on a French Mountain Air, Op. 25 – Daniel Wayenberg, piano/Orchestre du Theatre des Champs Elysees/Ernest Bour
Pristine Audio PASC 155, 25:45 (CD-R, DVD-R or FLAC) [www.pristineclassical.com] ***:
Among the more under-rated pianists, Daniel Wayenberg (b. 1929) remains a distinguished interpreter who made his American debut with Mitropoulos in 1953. Wayenberg recorded this otherwise elusive inscription of the D’Indy Symphony on a French Mountain Air (1886) for the Ducretet Thomson label 21-22 September 1954 at the Ancien Conservatoire, Paris, and issued on a 10” LP. The conductor, Ernest Bour (1913-2001) made a reputation in contemporary music. Pristine’s Andrew Rose managed to secure a copy from the collection of Jean-Francois Lambert and has applied the XR remastering process to vivid effect.
The classic performances of the D’Indy were those contemporaneous with this unheralded one, with Robert Casadesus (twice: one with Weldon, the other with Ormandy) and with Grant Johannesen. In the 1960s. Aldo Ciccolini would make his fine mark in this color piece. Bour manages to elicit appropriately nasal, mountain tones from his woodwinds, the English horn, the flute, and French horn over shimmering and grumbling strings that court an obbligato piano line out of the depths. The open-work proceeds with admirable fluency as piano, harp, triangle, and orchestra weave their limpid magic and ostinato riffs. The climax arrives with percussive and aerial pungency, high in the Cevennes mountains. The first movement fades in graduated colors between harp and keyboard into erotic mists. The second movement theme has a stately, martial quality, the colors of which suggest Roussel, the keyboard work all cascades and scherzino runs. Nice work from Bour’s violas underneath, then the dark segue to the theme in trumpets and tremolando strings. The crisp, full march then transforms into a fantasy for piano and orchestra, which had been the composer’s original designation for the work.
The last movement opens with a stunning, gradual crescendo, not far from Lalo’s opening for the last movement of his Symphonie espagnole, Op. 21. Wayenberg’s brilliant non-legato and then sweeping arpeggios fill the concert hall, along with strings and cymbals. Touches of Chausson infiltrate the aerial filigree, and the rondo theme emerges again in various, nervous guises, including gavotte and march. D’Indy’s capacity for counterpoint and thematic stretti proves audacious, the tension mounting and the colors scintillating with combustion until the march from the second movement asserts itself with ferocious vigor that dies and rebuilds. This leaves Wayenberg to introduce a series of frisky, metric variations on the motif that move with dazzling speed and virtuoso trumpet work. The last, urgent rush to judgment hits us with a decisive, dramatic punch. Vivid, idiomatic music-making of the first order, smoothly and effectively restored.
— Gary Lemco
