Jean-Nicolas Diatkine - Jean-Nicolas Diatkine Live, 2021 & 2023 (2024) [Official Digital Download 24/96]

Even at a time when recording techniques were not what they have become today, great musicians such as Wilhelm Furtwängler, then later Sergiu Celibidache, already had reservations about publishing their work other than from live performances. For them ‘live’ meant ‘alive’. That same credo was adopted to produce this album. Indeed, the wish for ‘immaculate perfection’ must sometimes give way to that for living music, which springs from a present moment that in its turn becomes the past… in an instant. In this way, performances are denied the possibility of revision, as studio recordings and subsequent editing allow. Yet if one is not careful in such reconstitution after the event, the very idea of a unique and privileged moment where the composer’s creativity can blossom forth unalloyed may be lost in the quest for seamless perfection, which however in reality becomes just an accumulation of faultless details. In that case the listener can do no more than follow their passage, without necessarily being able to grasp the overarching unity of a spontaneous expression.

This unity, or more precisely this striving for unity, is particularly remarkable in Beethoven, whose architectonic sense reached dizzying heights towards the end of his life. That is clearly audible in the last quartets, but also in the Bagatelles Op.126, ‘trifles’ composed about the same time as the Ninth Symphony Op.125. They are quite undeniably ‘trifles’, scarcely 15 minutes for the 6 pieces, but just like their supersized contemporaneous pendant, they nonetheless comprise a whole world. In this simultaneity of composition, it is as if Beethoven wants to establish a relationship of mutual inclusion between microcosm and macrocosm. ‘What I was able to do in large form, here you have it in miniature!’ Thus he lets us enter into a whole universe – by a little garden gate.

Tracklist:
01. 6 Bagatelles op.126: I Andante con moto Cantabile e compiacevole (Live)
02. 6 Bagatelles op.126: II Allegro (Live)
03. 6 Bagatelles op.126: III Andante Cantabile e grazioso (Live)
04. 6 Bagatelles op.126: IV Presto (Live)
05. 6 Bagatelles op.126: V Quasi allegretto (Live)
06. 6 Bagatelles op.126: VI Presto-Andante amabile e con moto-Tempo primo (Live)
07. Sonata in B minor: I Lento assai-Allegro energico (Live)
08. Sonata in B minor: II Andante sostenuto (Live)
09. Sonata in B minor: III Allegro energico (Live)
10. Sonata in B minor: IV Stretta quasi Presto (Live)
11. Tristan und Isolde: Isoldes Liebestod (Live)
12. Ballade N°2 (Live)


Thanks to the Original customer!