Alexandre Tansman - Piano Works (Margaret Fingerhut)

Information

Composer: Alexandre Tansman

• (01) Recueil de Mazurkas
• (11) Sonata rustica
• (14) Troisième Sonatine
• (17) Trois Préludes en forme de Blues
• (20) Quatre Nocturnes
• (24) Album d'amis

Margaret Fingerhut, piano
Date: 2009
Label: Chandos
https://www.chandos.net/products/catalogue/CHAN%2010527

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Review

Tansman’s charming music receives a poetic performance from Fingerhut

Alexandre Tansman lived from 1897 to 1986, and this selection of his compositions for solo piano spans the years 1915 to 1980. From carefree youthfulness to elderly melancholia? Such an extreme progression was not Tansman’s style: but there is a clear shift from early sparkle to later wistfulness. This is not music to storm the barricades, whether in defence or defiance of modernism. What it has, in these well judged, well recorded performances, is charm, and a refusal to spin things out which are best left concise and understated.

The initial collection of mazurkas establishes Tansman’s favoured stylistic territory for piano music, in which echoes of Paderewski and Rachmaninov co-exist contentedly with hints of Szymanowski and Prokofiev. In the relatively expansive Sonata rustica (1925) dedicated to Ravel, that meticulous master is a presence, but so too is Poulenc and (up to a point) Stravinsky. The mélange is refreshing but studiously unprofound, even in the relatively rhapsodic and showy gestures of the sonata’s first movement, and Margaret Fingerhut has an unerring sense of when to indulge the flamboyance, as well as of how to introduce a poetic quality without becoming unduly sentimental.

The later pieces, all collections of miniatures, include the rather soft-centred Trois Préludes en forme de blues, and the very late Album d’amis, whose friends pictured within include pianists and publishers. Most of these are little more than casual doodles, though elements of vigour and harmonic “bite” pop up when you least expect them. You can even sense the anarchic spirit of Erik Satie looking over Tansman’s shoulder, reminding him not to be too solemn.

-- Arnold Whittall, Gramophone

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Alexandre Tansman (12 June 1897 – 15 November 1986) was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist of Jewish origin. He spent his early years in his native Poland, but lived in France for most of his life, being granted French citizenship in 1938. His music is often said to be primarily neoclassical, drawing on his Polish Jewish heritage as well as his French musical influences. Tansman wrote more than 300 works, including 7 operas, 11 ballets, 6 oratorios, 80 orchestral pages (with 9 symphonies), and numerous works of chamber and piano music. Almost all his works have been now recorded on CDs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Tansman

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Margaret Fingerhut (born 30 March 1955) is a British classical pianist. She studied at the Royal College of Music with Cyril Smith and Angus Morrison, then with Vlado Perlemuter in Paris, and Leon Fleisher and Adele Marcus in the USA. A fascination with exploring lesser-known repertoire is reflected in her eclectic recital programmes and also in her recordings, which include works by Bainton, Bax, Berkeley, Bloch, Dukas, Falla, Grieg, Howells, Leighton, Moeran, Novák, Stanford, Suk and Tansman, as well as pioneering collections of 19th century Russian and early 20th century French piano music.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Fingerhut

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