For Marguerite Long, celebrated and infamous grande dame of the Paris Conservatoire, the French Piano School was “lucid, precise, slender. If it concentrates above all on grace rather than force, guarding its equilibrium and sense of proportion, it nevertheless does not bow to any other in the power and and the profundity of its inner emotion.” However questionable, such rhetoric is acutely pitched. Yet as EMI’s magnificent celebration suggests, the greatest pianists, while recognizably the product of a school, invariably transcended their ambience or training to become themselves. Cortot (greatest of all French pianists), though demonstrably French and scintillating in every bar, is important because he is Cortot, not because he is French. Lesser artists, on the other hand, remain, simply, French pianists.
Mention of Cortot brings me to a subtle and potent influence, one that reacted strongly to Marguerite Long’s notorious insularity and partis pris. For Cortot, poetic range expressed in the richest beauty and variety of sound were cardinal qualities of great artistry, qualities above and beyond the high-fingered surface facility favoured by Long, a love of directions such as lointain and sans rigeur as well as vif and clarte. There were always rebels within the camp anxious to move on beyond what Jean-Philippe Collard amusingly calls digital or “diggy-diggy-diggy-dee” piano playing. And here Yves Nat and Yvonne Lefebure, both in repertoire and performance, are the odd pianists out in this intriguing selection. Nat, for example, specialized in Bach’s 48 and in Beethoven’s 32 sonatas. For him the human heart was the truest metronome and his students were encouraged to fight for romantic freedom, for depth of sonority, variety of colour, voicing and instrumentation. He achieves a true parlando in Schubert’s Moment musical No. 2 and in No. 6 his disarming simplicity is a far cry from other pianists. Yet he is every inch the romantic in Chopin, playing the Second Sonata’s first movement with a true sense of its equestrian, nightmare momentum and offering an undignified, if temporarily fashionable, alternative to Chopin’s scrupulously marked dynamic scheme in the Funeral March. True, compared to a Rubinstein or Lipatti, he skims the surface of the Barcarolle’s most ecstatically charged pages yet he is never less than a free spirit and one essentially attuned to Chopin’s elegance and volatility. His Brahms, too, is frisky and characterful in a style frowned on today yet his avoidance of all textural and poetic opacity is a refreshing change from so many ‘serious’ alternatives. His second performance of the Intermezzo, Op. 117 No. 2 has a near Faurean evanescence and if his Stravinsky is headlong and chaotic his Liszt sparks with genuine daredevilry.
Yvonne Lefebure, after her early championship of Dukas and Faure as well as Debussy and Ravel, turned to the most profoundly speculative masterpieces of the German repertoire; rewarded for her enterprise with accolades from Faure, Cortot, Casals, Walter and Furtwangler. Her performance of Mozart’s D minor Concerto with the latter is of the greatest documentary interest, blazing with romantic vehemence (and never more so than in cadenzas of the strangest provenance, apparently written by Fred Goldbeck). Her Bach-Liszt is magnificently strong and direct and there is no doubting her exultancy in the most radiant pages of Beethoven – the Sonatas, Opp. 109 and 110 and the Diabelli Variations. Everything is kept smartly on the move (an effect accentuated by her lack of repeats) but if the playing lacks the transcendental quality of the greatest Beethoven pianists – of Annie Fisher, Schnabel and Kempff, for example – it is never less than zestful, alive with a pioneering sense of adventure.
Brazilian-born but French-trained Magda Tagliaferro also turned to Cortot for inspiration but the results could hardly be more different. Her Chopin and Schumann are touched with a rare poetic fire and brio. You may take issue with this or that detail but you can hardly deny that you are listening to performances of a special virtuoso largesse and generosity, qualities that also made her a superb exponent of the Spanish and South American repertoire. Her Debussy may be glorious and worldly- wise rather than silvery or remote but you will be hard pressed to find a greater charm or stylistic awareness than in, say, Villa-Lobos’s Rosa amarela. A pianist of insatiable energy and allure Tagliaferro performed into her eighties and was last seen in this country at London’s Wigmore Hall showing us all how to play Chopin etudes, resplendent in glitter and a wig as vibrant as a Belisher Beacon.
Jean Casadesus was part of a formidable French musical dynasty and although his album contains a selection of Scarlatti sonatas played with delectable lightness and fluency by his father, Robert, the larger part is given to his artistry. His Ravel concertos are elegantly understated, his understanding of his father’s brilliant neo-classicism (particularly in his witty Sardande) complete. He is admirably pointed in his Couperin and Rameau and he scores a real hit with Francaix’s “La moderne” from his Portraits de jeunes filles, impishly delighting in the composer’s naughty play of French cafe blague and sophistication.
Jacques Fevrier, who gave the world premiere of Poulenc’s Concerto for two pianos with the composer, demonstrates an ultra-French sense of how economy of expression can accentuate rather than blunt Poulenc’s mix of faux-naif charm and sudden nostalgia. As the notes suggest, he is hardly Horowitzian and is hard pressed by the final busy “Caprice italien” from Poulenc’s Napoli, but in terms of sheer style he and Poulenc have never been surpassed in the Double Piano Concerto, one of the composer’s most endearing and innovative creations. He is no less successful in Milhaud’s Saudades do Brasil, musically cunning and sympathetic to the teasing bitonality and alternations of indolence and hyperactivity. Tagliaferro herself could hardly have offered more affecting readings.
But I have left the piece de resistance until last, Jeanne-Marie Darre’s discs of the concertos Saint-Saens concertos and the enchanting Septet. Darre was once described as a pianist in need of protection from her own vitality, and her legendary sparkle and aplomb remained undimmed late into her career. In the best French tradition her playing is like vintage champagne and it is no surprise to find that with Horowitz as her chief inspiration she practised scales in thirds, sixths and octaves with the most life-affirming results. She celebrated her twenty-first birthday by playing all five concertos Saint-Saens concertos in one concert and her recordings, whether delighting in the composer’s journey from Bach to Offenbach (No. 2) or the croaking frogs of the Nile (No. 5) are the ultimate in effervescence and French joie de vivre.
With very few exceptions the transfers of these recordings, dating from 1929 to 1972, have been superbly managed. Above all, even the most avid follower of French pianism will be enticed and astonished by breadth rather than narrowness of vision, by a magical richness and variety.'