Many who know of pianist
Robert Levin will readily link his name with that of
Mozart, not only as an interpreter but as an expert
Mozart editor indentified with his controversial take on
Mozart's
Requiem. However, one aspect of
Levin's career that is a little less well known is as one of
Nadia Boulanger's former students; as she went into her final illness,
Boulanger named
Levin to instruct in her stead at the Conservatoire americain in Fontainebleau. There
Levin first met
Henri Dutilleux and immediately fell under the spell of the older composer's piano music and has ever since wanted to record an album of
Dutilleux. In
D'ombre et de silence,
ECM New Series has afforded
Levin the opportunity and the timing is appropriate given the passing of
Dutilleux's own authoritative interpreter at the piano -- his wife,
Genevieve Joy -- in 2009.
Levin presses his own spouse, pianist
Ya-Fei Chuang, into the service of
Dutilleux's four-hand
Figures de resonances (1970-1976).
The selection spans
Dutilleux's practically entire career and even includes little miniatures that
Dutilleux wrote for student pianists such as
Blackbird (1950).
Dutilleux's
Piano Sonata (1946-1948) is given prominent placement, right after the tiny
Petit air a dormer debout (1981), which opens the disc and this makes sense, as it is the work that
Dutilleux himself considers his own "Opus 1" despite the existence of a whole range of compositions that precede it, and it remains his major keyboard work; only the
Preludes (1973-1988) come close to emulating its stature in his output.
Levin's interpretations of
Dutilleux's music are right on target; shimmering, colorful, and sensitive at one end of his spectrum and cold, metallic, spatial, and clangorous at the other, and
ECM's recording is very realistic, loud, and crisp. About the only thing that doesn't seem to work here is the front cover image, a photograph of
Jean Marc Dellac so conceptual that it may reaffirm for some Americans the myth that
Dutilleux's music is hard and unapproachable. Overall, it is not, though some of the thundering chords in
Figures de resonances have lost little of their shock value since
Dutilleux wrote them down in the '70s. Otherwise he is much an acolyte of the keyboard school of
Debussy as anyone can imagine among composers active after World War II, a quality
Dutilleux shares with his slightly older contemporary
Olivier Messiaen.
Dutilleux remains kind of antsy about having pre-piano sonata era works recorded, so
Levin has placed the earliest pieces at the end, though two of the
Au gre des ondes (1946) show up also earlier in the program; these do not seem to be the same recordings as the later ones.
There are other full disc surveys of
Dutilleux's slim output for piano that are noteworthy, for example those by
Anne Queffelec,
John Chen, and of course,
Genevieve Joy.
Levin's contribution represents a fresh perspective on this music and should please both newcomers and experienced listeners alike; as far as that goes, the more the merrier.~Uncle Dave Lewis
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