Wedding Cake: Music for Piano Duo = SAINT-SAENS: Wedding Cake; FAURE: Dolly Suite; RAVEL: La Valse; DEBUSSY: Petite Suite; CHIHARA: Ami Suite; DUKAS: L’Apprenti sorcier; POULENC: Elegie; L’Embarquement pour Cythera – Pascal and Ami Roge, pianos – Onyx

by | Dec 21, 2010 | Classical CD Reviews | 0 comments

Wedding Cake: Music for Piano Duo = SAINT-SAENS: Wedding Cake, Op. 76; FAURE: Dolly Suite, Op. 56; RAVEL: La Valse; DEBUSSY: Petite Suite; CHIHARA: Ami Suite;  DUKAS: L’Apprenti sorcier; POULENC: Elegie; L’Embarquement pour Cythera – Pascal and Ami Roge, pianos – Onyx 4047, 76:59 [Distr. by Harmonia mundi] ****:

This album presents a wedding-present by the artists to themselves: Pascal and Ami Roge were married in Shimonoseki, Japan on 8 March 2009, and they inscribed these selections in Switzerland, July 2009. The album carries a rubric: “Four hands and two hearts.” The 1885 Valse-Caprice by Saint-Saens has always appealed to me, ever since I heard Grant Johannesen and Sir Eugene Goossens perform it on an old Capitol LP. The natural sparkle of the piece finds ample éclat in this performance, which can best be likened to hearing the Robert and Gaby Casadesus team of old. The 2009 Chihara suite celebrates the Roges’ romance quite explicitly.

So, too, Faure’s 1894 Dolly Suite proceeds with ripe innocence, the Berceuse melting our hears from its first dripping chords. The ingenuous colors culminate in a virile Spanish dance, Pas espagnol, in which the Roges’ keys glisten in the Mediterranean sun. La Valse gives a sense of the demonic power that the old Viennese waltz could unleash when treated surreally by the master Ravel in 1919. Like all of Ravel’s dance-forms, the piece eventually explodes of its own atomic weight at the end, a kaleidoscopic convulsion to mark the end of an era.  Debussy’s 1886 Petite Suite, a relatively early work in his oeuvre, accommodates brilliance and élan as well as the Ravel La Valse, the Cortege by the Roges particularly noble and refined. For technical firepower, we have a two-piano arrangement of Paul Dukas 1897 Scherzo, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Even scored for two pianos, the piece rings with vivid colors, the staccati especially pungent, and the cross rhythms in minor thirds vibrant, despite the lack of orchestral timbres per se. The swirling of the waters in canon quite consumes the upper registers of the keyboard, the scampering of the bewitched broomsticks quite feverish. The cyclonic furor and the piece, of course, ends in the apprentice’s humiliation; and no matter how we try, we cannot deny those last four notes–a la Beethoven’s Fifth or Wagner‘s Ride of the Valkyries--that swat Mickey’s derriere as well-earned punishment. 


Paul Chihara’s 2009 Ami Suite is set in five sections, each of which is beholden to outside influences: from Western, cowboy tunes to Anton Webern’s Op. 27 Variations. The first movement, a kind of music lesson, proves pointillist and staccato. The Love Song, movement two, presents the soul of Ami, with bits of Gershwin ragtime (from Concerto in F) superimposed on chords from Tristan and Debussy’s Faun. The Pascal Rag, movement three, portrays a Gershwinized Pascal as Florestan to Ami’s Eusebius, with a love tune borrowed from Humperdinck’s Haensel und Gretel. The Dragonfly Movement (“Aka Tombo” in a Japanese folk song) pays homage to Japan as the source of burgeoning and enduring love. A sharp ear can detect Schumann’s late Op. 134 Introduction and Concert-Allegro in D Minor in variation. The last movement immediately invokes Debussy’s Faun, then proceeds to a direct quote from Poulenc’s Piano Concerto. Motifs from the previous movements enter, collide, and mix, with Gershwin’s Piano Concerto–second movement–dominant, until the contrapuntally extended version of the Love Song a la Webern, finally resolving to romantic figures in A-flat Major. No more games, just love.

Two pieces by Francis Poulenc conclude this love-letter: the 1959 Elegie for Two Pianos, a sophisticated, extended moment of melancholy with a heavy sense of pedal, in the manner of a French Noel Coward. It ends in clarion chords, a flash of Ravel’s Valley of Bells. And last, the 1951 Embarkation to Cythera, the island of amorous love. Folksy and breezy, the piece came from Poulenc’s affection for the American duo of Gold and Fizdale. That same affection pervades this eminently playful performance.

–Gary Lemco


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