Hommages Musicaux

Album review

The tombeau, a piece written in memory of a deceased artist, has a long history in western music, extending back as far as the early Baroque. The most famous modern tombeau is Ravel's 1917 piano suite Le Tombeau de Couperin, which he later orchestrated. After Debussy's death in 1918, the Parisian journal Revue Musicale commissioned 10 prominent composers to contribute movements to a Tombeau de Claude Debussy. The variety of the compositions reflects something of the diversity in trends in European composition, excluding the developments in Germany, of course, which was still widely considered the enemy of the French. Some of the pieces reflect the content or subject matter of Debussy's music, and others are entirely independent of his influence. While each of the pieces has a strong character, the most musically arresting contribution is Ravel's Duo pour Violine et Violoncelle, which he later incorporated into his sonata, also dedicating that piece to Debussy. Bartók's Improvisations on a Hungarian Peasant Song and Dukas' La plainte, au loin, du faune..., both for piano, are more modest works, but brilliantly evocative of the sadness caused by Debussy's death.
The Debussy tombeau was such a success that Revue Musicale decided to commission another composite work, this time in honor of a living composer, Gabriel Fauré. Hommage à Gabriel Fauré includes the work of seven composers, six of whom were French. The journal constructed a grid for assigning pitches to the letters of Fauré's name, and asked the composers to use that pitch set as the basis for their pieces. Being an homage to a living artist rather than a memorial, this set is considerably livelier. Florent Schmitt's virtuosic contribution is particularly engaging.
The majority of these works are for piano, but there are some exceptions. Besides the Ravel Duo, de Falla wrote a guitar solo and Satie a song for the Debussy tribute. Charles Koechlin and Jean Roger-Ducasse wrote pieces for piano, four-hands, for Fauré. Pianists Andrey Kasparov and Oksana Lutsyshyn perform with polish and fervor. Mezzo-soprano Lisa Relaford Coston's full, warm voice soars in the Satie song. The sound on all the tracks except for the Satie, which is somewhat distant-sounding, is clear and resonant.

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