Eric Le Sage - Jardins suspendus (2022) [Official Digital Download 24/96]

Eminent representative of the French piano school, the pianist Eric Le Sage offers a new album in the form of a poetic walk in the secret gardens of 22 French composers of the late 19th and early 20th century.

Between the Belle Époque and the Roaring Twenties, around two world wars that had to be healed, in the vertigo of all the rebirths and that of progress on the march, music also needed calm, humanity and natural intimacy. While twenty-two French composers cultivate their secret soul, in a few piano miniatures, electricity, the gramophone, the little queen, the Parisian metro … are already inviting themselves into people's daily lives.

The woman emerges, emancipates herself and recolorizes a little a society in struggle, which claims a fairer sharing of goods, the happiness of living, and also the right to carelessness. The music then escapes a little from the new artistic tempo of that time: Dadaism, surrealism. The language of the musicians evolves, but without expressing the same urgency of fracture, of liberation, as that of other artistic creators. Surreal and free, these gardens suspended over this period are already so, seeming to care less about expression than impression, ideas than sensations. Between César Franck, Ernest Chausson and Jehan Alain, all three inscribed in a single century.

The composers who have suspended their gardens in this album have almost all lived between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Dupont, Cras, Aubert, D'Indy, Hahn, Ibert, Pierné, Vierne, Samazeuilh, Schmitt, Chaminade, Boulanger, Honegger, Tailleferre, Séverac, Saint-Saëns, Poulenc, Satie represent a particularly prolific era for French music, even if posterity will not be offered to everyone up to his talent. Their hanging gardens, often secret, always interior, are undoubtedly not representative of all the artistic ambitions that their protagonists have deployed throughout their Work, but they present themselves in depth and sincerity as so many little unknown refuges. Talentedly evoking nature and its bucolic landscapes, each of these compositions offers its reading of a colorful post-romanticism that participates in the retention of time, inviting what is needed of mystery and nostalgia.

TRACKLIST

1 Les Heures dolentes: V. Apres-midi de dimanche
2 Paysages: I. Maritime
3 Trois morceaux pour piano : I. D'un vieux jardin
4 Le rossignol eperdu: No. 52, Hivernale
5 Gnossienne No. 2
6 Matin sur l'eau
7 Valse nonchalante in D-Flat Major, Op. 110
8 Tableaux de voyage, Op. 33: IV. Lac vert
9 Deux pieces pour piano, Op. 7: II. Impression d'Automne
10 15 Pieces, Op. 3: VI. Prelude
11 3 Esquisses, Op.7: II. Nocturne
12 La maison dans les dunes: IX. Clair d'etoiles
13 Premieres valses: V. A l'ombre reveuse de Chopin
14 Gnossienne No. 1
15 Deux valses pour deux pianos: I. Valse lente (arr. for Solo Piano)
16 Le chant de la mer: I. Prelude
17 Musiques intimes, Book 1, Op. 16: I. Doux et calme
18 6 Romances sans paroles, Op. 76: I. Souvenance
19 Souvenir de Chopin
20 Paysage, Op.38
21 Valse des musiques de soie
22 Suite facile: II. Comme une barcarolle
23 En vacances, Book 1, No. 7: Valse Romantique
24 Gnossienne No. 3
25 Vers la vie nouvelle
26 Prelude, fugue et variation, Op. 18: I. Prelude



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