Sofya Melikyan - Présence lointaine (2023) [Official Digital Download 24/48]

Sofya Melikyan’s fascinating album has as its inspiration the great Ricardo Viñes, composer and pianist, champion of young progressive composers (he was Satie’s favourite performer of his music), whose friends included among others Picasso, Gide, Colette, Cocteau.

Cocteau said of him ‘Viñes does not play, he elucidates’. To define Viñes ‘the shining light of contemporary art’, as Adolfo Salazar described him in 1918 as the pianist of the French avant-garde is absolutely correct, albeit quite inadequate at the same time.

Like his compatriots Granados and Malats, he was a student of De Bériot, and taking First Prize in piano at the Paris Conservatoire in 1894 followed by his first recital at the Salle Pleyel on 21 February 1895 marked the launch of a career that, over the course of four decades, would prove to be as frenetic as it was thrilling.

Viñes’s insatiable curiosity for so-called ‘modern music’ and his ever restless temperament, always eager to discover neglected repertoire of the present day and to present it to the public as well as music from the past, became apparent very early on, as in his recital of 18 April 1898 at the Salle Érard, at which he gave the premiere of the Menuet antique by one of his first and greatest friends in Paris, Maurice Ravel, or in his historic cycle of four concerts that he would give in the same hall between March and April 1905 devoted to ‘Keyboard music from its origins to the present day’.

Tracklist:
01. En Languedoc: I. Vers le Mas en Fête
02. En Languedoc: II. Sur l'étang, le soir
03. En Languedoc: III. À cheval, dans la prairie
04. En Languedoc: IV. Coin de cimetière, au printemps
05. En Languedoc: V. Le Jour de Foire, au mas
06. Quatre Hommages pour le piano: I. Menuet spectral (à la mémoire de Maurice Ravel)
07. Quatre Hommages pour le piano: II. En Verlaine Mineur (à la mémoire de Gabriel Fauré)
08. Quatre Hommages pour le piano: III. Thrénodie ou Funérailles antiques (à la mémoire de Erik Satie)
09. Quatre Hommages pour le piano: IV. Crinoline ou La Valse au temps de la Montijo (Hommage à Léon-Paul Fargue)
10. Miroirs, M. 43: II. Oiseaux tristes
11. 3 Nocturnes, Op. 33: III. Nocturne in A Flat
12. Descriptions automatiques: I. Sur un vaisseau
13. Descriptions automatiques: II. Sur une lanterne
14. Descriptions automatiques: III. Sur un casque
15. Scènes d'enfants: I. Cris dans la rue
16. Scènes d'enfants: II. Jeux sur la Plage I. Jeu
17. Scènes d'enfants: III. Jeux sur la Plage II. Jeu
18. Scènes d'enfants: IV. Jeux sur la Plage III. Jeu
19. Scènes d'enfants: V. Jeunes Filles au Jardin


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