Debussy - Szymanowski - Hahn - Ravel

Resenha do Álbum

By joining forces in a violin and piano duo, Fanny Robilliard and Paloma Kouider succeed in expressing perfect harmony between their two personalities, much like they had done as chamber musicians in Trio Karénine. Conceived with subtle tastes tinted with originality, their 2017 debut album features the very best sonatas of Debussy and Reval. The album sheds a new light on their works without debasing them and provides us with an alternative outlook on the masterpieces of these two giants of French music from the early nineteenth century.

In the midst of the First World War, a sickened and diminished Debussy demonstrated his ‘Frenchness’ by composing his Sonata for violin and piano. The sonata paid homage to the 18th century through exhibiting the composer’s fantastic and imaginative side while communicating a sense of intense modernity, void of parody or pastiche. Weary of the classical reputation attributed to him, Ravel composed his Sonata for violin and piano (n°2) in the 1920s under the influence of the jazz that he had discovered in New York in the company of George Gershwin. Enamoured by classical culture, Karol Szymanowski conceived at the same time her three Mythes poems, a kind of sonata in disguise inspired by ambiant impressionism. On a completely different note, Reynaldo Hahn’s Nocturne works to skilfully weave together feeling of Antiquity and “American” modernity. © François Hudry/Qobuz