Liadov : Intégrale de l'œuvre pour piano, Volumes 3 et 4

Description

Anatoli Liadov was a prodigy of orchestration; his brief symphonic oils composed striking tableaux where colors and bold harmonies literally brought the subject to life. It is little known that Diaghilev commissioned him to compose the music for L’Oiseau de feu. Liadov set to work on it, but then his pen abandoned him. His art was only suited for the brief and the allusive. To this was added a constant doubt about his artistic abilities, which hindered him both in his music and in his social life. Aside from his striking orchestration, he primarily composed for the piano, and with enough talent that Tatiana Nikolayeva dedicated a full album to him on Melodiya, which has since disappeared. Stephen Coombs added a lovely anthology for Hyperion. Olga Solovieva ventures into the complete works - here are volumes 3 and 4; I know nothing of the first two parts - an opportunity to delve deeper into the lyricism of this secretive composer, a contemporary of Scriabin (which can be sensed subtly), whose piano is much more than just a salon instrument, as the Preludes, Mazurkas, Barcarolle, and other portrait pieces dedicated to painters or poets might suggest by their titles. Everywhere there is a discreet yet powerful inventiveness - listen to the Preludes op. 36 that the young Scriabin would not have disowned, and whose second one blurs the colors of a Prelude by Chopin, fascinating - and sometimes a grand gesture that indicates how this art could have gone further if the composer had believed a little more in himself: the Variations on a theme by Glinka that Tatiana Nikolayeva loved so much and that Olga Solovieva plays with both brilliance and tenderness: her sonorous keyboard, contrasting registers, and her technique, which becomes forgotten to be just music, do justice to this little-known aspect of the history of Russian piano. (Jean-Charles Hoffelé)