Henri Dutilleux - Piano Works (Anne Queffélec)

Information

Composer: Henri Dutilleux

• (01) Sonate pour piano
• (04) Préludes pour piano
• (07) "Tous les chemins... mènent à Rome"
• (08) Bergerie
• (09) Blackbird
• (10) Résonances
• (11) Figure de résonances, pour 2 pianos
• (15) Au gré des ondes

Anne Queffélec, piano
Date: 1996
Label: Virgin Classics

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Review

Given her preferred repertory of Scarlatti, Mozart and the twentieth-century French masters – Debussy, Ravel, Satie, Poulenc – Anne Queffelec is the ideal pianist for Dutilleux. With an innate delicacy of tone colour and precision of touch, yet a virtuosic exuberance that has nothing in the least apologetic about it, she has the full measure of the most substantial work here, the Sonata of 1946-7, and her recording makes as good a case for the piece as that of Genevieve Joy.

The other compositions are all miniatures, and range from various very early items of great charm, like the Tous les chemins... menent a Rome collection, to works from the composer’s more exploratory later years. Some, like the Figures de resonances for two pianos, are too scrappy to arouse much interest, but most are well worth hearing. Listening to the finely polished but unashamedly derivative Au gre des ondes (1946) it’s easier to appreciate how difficult it must have been for Dutilleux to shake off so elegantly turned and touchingly expressed a devotion to the Poulenc style. But the Piano Sonata demonstrates his ability to create substantial, dramatic structures, and the three Preludes, especially the last, dating from 1988, reflect the significant stylistic progress he made over 40 years – primarily, of course, in orchestral music. What a pity that we don’t (yet) have a substantial second sonata, in Dutilleux’s later manner, to place alongside the first.

The recording goes out of its way to avoid undue resonance, and risks a rather hard piano tone at higher dynamic levels as a result. But Dutilleux enthusiasts should not hesitate.

-- Arnold Whittall, Gramophone

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Henri Dutilleux (2 January 1916 – 22 May 2013) was a French composer. His work, which garnered international acclaim, followed in the tradition of Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, and Albert Roussel, but in an idiosyncratic style. Some of his notable compositions include a piano sonata, two symphonies, a cello concerto, a violin concerto and a string quartet. Some of these are regarded as masterpieces of 20th-century classical music. A perfectionist with a strong sense of artistic integrity, he allowed only a small number of his works to be published and often repeatedly revised them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Dutilleux

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Anne Queffélec (born 17 January 1948 in Paris) is a French pianist. She started playing piano at the age of five and enrolled in the Paris Conservatoire in 1964. Queffélec studied with Paul Badura-Skoda and Jörg Demus, and in Vienna with Alfred Brendel. She won the first prize at the Munich competition in 1968, and since then has enjoyed an international career. Queffélec is not only famous as a solo concert pianist, but is also well known for her chamber music playing in cooperation with artists such as Catherine Collard, Pierre Amoyal, Frédéric Lodéon, and Imogen Cooper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Queff%C3%A9lec

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