Jardins suspendus

Description

Eminent representative of the French school of piano, pianist Eric Le Sage offers a new album in the form of a poetic stroll through the secret gardens of 22 French composers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Between the Belle Époque and the Roaring Twenties, around two world wars from which one had to heal, in the vertigo of all the renaissances and that of progress in motion, music also needed calm, humanity, and intimacy in its natural form. While twenty-two French composers cultivate their secret soul, in a few pianistic miniatures, electricity, the gramophone, the bicycle, the Paris metro... are already making their way into people's daily lives. Women emerge, emancipate, and slightly recolor a society in struggle, which demands a fairer distribution of goods, the happiness of living, and also the right to carefreeness. Music then somewhat escapes the new artistic tempo of this era: Dadaism, Surrealism. The language of musicians evolves, but without expressing the same urgency of fracture, of liberation, as that of other artistic creators. Surreal and free, these suspended gardens of this era already seem less concerned with expression than with impression, with ideas than with 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 almost all lived straddling 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 granted to each in proportion to their talent. Their suspended gardens, often secret, always interior, are undoubtedly not representative of all the artistic ambitions that their protagonists deployed throughout their work, but they present themselves in depth and sincerity as so many little unknown refuges. Skillfully evoking nature and its bucolic landscapes, each of these compositions offers its interpretation of a colorful post-romanticism that contributes to the retention of time, inviting just the right amount of mystery and nostalgia.