A unique and scintillating collection of music for violin, clarinet and piano spinning out from the ‘Harlequin Years’ of Paris.
During the first decades of the last century, Paris took over from Vienna as the centre of the art-music’s universe. Ideas and styles exploded like fireworks from the French capital, and among the first figures sending them into the wider world was Claude Debussy. His Première Rhapsodie began life as a competition piece for clarinet, first performed in 1911, and while the later orchestral version is now more commonly heard, it is instructive to revisit the composer’s original, more subtly allusive first thoughts. Seven years later, by now dying of cancer, Debussy completed the last of three works in which he returned to the traditional form of sonata which he had avoided through much of his career in favour of tone-pictures such as the Préludes and suites for piano. The Violin Sonata counts among his most concise and refined works in an output touched throughout by those qualities, demanding the greatest subtlety and passion from its interpreters.
In the same year as the Première Rhapsodie, Stravinsky had scored his career-defining succès de scandale with the premiere of Le sacre du printemps, and by 1918 he was established as a darling of the Parisian avant-garde when he composed L’histoire du soldat (first performed in Lausanne; Diaghilev’s staging in Paris had to wait until 1924) for a septet of instruments and narrator. The following year he arranged five self-contained numbers from the score into a suite, further reduced for a spiky instrumental trio and featuring the marvellously sly tango as well as the Rite-like final Danse du soldat.
Milhaud’s Suite and Bartók’s Contrasts date from two decades later, but they are still infused with the absinthe and lemon of 20s Parisian culture. Heard together, the five works paint a portrait of a world of dazzling colours and restless momentum, sometimes bewildered by its own precosity, taking what it wanted from old cultures and always breaking new paths.
· This new recording presents works for the unusual combination of Clarinet, Violin and Piano, all written in the first half of the 20th century, and most of them with an inspirational tie with the French capital of Paris.
· Included are the suite from L’Histoire du Soldat by Stravinsky, the trio by Darius Milhaud, the famous Contrasts by Béla Bartók and the first Rhapsody for clarinet and piano and Violin Sonata by Debussy. All works express that unique, thrilling atmosphere of the era, in which new experiments were tried and music was enriched by elements of the Jazz and Folk Music.
· Played by one of Italy’s foremost clarinet players Davide Bandieri, violinist Gyula Stuller and pianist Gerardo Vila. Bandieri already successfully recorded for Brilliant Classics works by Busoni, Hindemith, Frühling and Zemlinsky.
