Messiaen - Oiseaux exotiques; Ravel & Schoenberg - Piano Concertos
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Label: Pentatone
Cat No: PTC5186949
Format: Hybrid SACD
Number of Discs: 1
Genre: Orchestral
Release Date: 1st July 2022
Contents
Artists
Francesco Piemontesi (piano)Orchestre de la Suisse Romande
Conductor
Jonathan NottWorks
Oiseaux exotiquesPiano Concerto in G major
Piano Concerto, op.42
Artists
Francesco Piemontesi (piano)Orchestre de la Suisse Romande
Conductor
Jonathan NottAbout
The Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and its Music and Artistic Director Jonathan Nott continue their acclaimed series of 20th-century masterpieces on PENTATONE, together with star pianist Francesco Piemontesi, presenting piano concertos by Ravel and Schoenberg alongside Messiaen’s Oiseaux exotiques. Each of these composers redefined 20th-century music in a highly personal way, and the works recorded here share a connection to the United States which one would perhaps not expect right away from these European master composers. While Ravel and Schoenberg’s piano concertos provide the most original and colourful 20th-century contributions to this genre, Messiaen employs a similar scoring to express his profound reverence for nature in Oiseaux exotiques. These challenging and multifarious scores fit Piemontesi, Nott and the orchestra like a glove.
Francesco Piemontesi is among the most-cherished pianists of our age, and presents the third fruit of his exclusive collaboration with PENTATONE, having released the acclaimed Schubert - Last Piano Sonatas (2019) and Bach Nostalghia (2021). The Orchestre de la Suisse Romande is one of the world’s most respected orchestras with a vast PENTATONE discography. This is their third release on the label with their Music and Artistic Director Jonathan Nott, after Strauss, Debussy & Ligeti (2018) and the gloriously received Debussy & Schoenberg: Pelléas et Mélisande (2021), containing Nott’s new arrangement of Debussy’s opera.
Sound/Video
Paused
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1Ravel: Piano Concerto in G major: 1. Allegramente
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2Ravel: Piano Concerto in G major: 2. Adagio assai
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3Ravel: Piano Concerto in G major: 3. Presto
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4Messiaen: Oiseaux exotiques
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5Schoenberg: Piano Concerto, op.42: 1. Andante
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6Schoenberg: Piano Concerto, op.42: 2. Molto allegro
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7Schoenberg: Piano Concerto, op.42: 3. Adagio
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8Schoenberg: Piano Concerto, op.42: 4. Giocoso. Moderato
Europadisc Review
Since leaving the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra and becoming artistic and musical director of the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande in 2017, British conductor Jonathan Nott has exchanged his Mahlerian hat (an acclaimed cycle of the symphonies with the Bambergers for the Tudor label) for a series of Pentatone discs featuring imaginative couplings of French and central-European 20th-century works. In 2018 he and the OSR gave us a thought-provoking programme of Debussy’s Jeux alongside Richard Strauss’s Schlagobers Suite and Ligeti’s Melodien. In 2021 they followed up with a disc of Schoenberg’s symphonic poem after Maeterlinck, Pelleas und Melisande, paired with Nott’s own symphonic suite on Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande. For their latest release, Debussy gives way to his younger contemporary Ravel, while Schoenberg reappears, in a marvellously colourful programme of piano concertos from the mid-20th century. The soloist is Swiss pianist Francesco Piemontesi, who has previously recorded solo programmes of Schubert and Bach for Pentatone.
Ravel’s playful, jazz-infused G major Piano Concerto (1929-31, the composer’s penultimate work) and Schoenberg’s 12-tone Piano Concerto, op.42 (1942) – obliquely autobiographical, and dripping with gestures of late-Romanticism – are separated by Olivier Messiaen’s coruscatingly kaleidoscopic Oiseaux exotiques (1955-56), with its brilliant harnessing of birdsong to create a concentrated, coherent concerto in all but name which pushes keyboard virtuosity to wonderful musical extremes. Each of these works is splendidly pithy, the Ravel in the ‘standard’ three movements, Schoenberg in four discrete sections that run continuously, Messiaen in a stunningly colourful single-movement span of 15 minutes. Presented side-by-side like this, they strike the listener as ideally complementary works, and Piemontesi, Nott and the Geneva orchestra highlight the salient individuality of each in turn.
First to be recorded (in November 2020) was the Ravel: a performance that may lack the forensic level of interrogation that Boulez brought to the score in his Cleveland recording with Krystian Zimerman, but injected with real ebullience and a sound-picture that integrates the piano well within the orchestra to create a well-balanced partnership. In the first movement – part-Basque folk idiom, part jazz – the saxophone-like, vibrato-laden solo bassoon is a real ear-catcher, as are the magical textures conjured by harp, woodwind and piano in the chain of cadenzas during the recapitulation. Piemontesi is fabulously dexterous in the outer movements, with the quickfire Presto finale dispatched with an elan that doesn’t obscure its musicality. But it is the central Adagio, with its long, singing lines so evocative of Mozart and its subtle rhythmic interplay, that forms the heart of the performance – a movement regarded as problematic by some commentators, but which silences all criticism here.
Like the Ravel Concerto, the scoring of Messiaen’s Oiseaux exotiques is – aside from a formidable array of percussion – fairly compact. But the work’s particular demands mean that the piano – sometimes the only instrument playing for long stretches, at others equal partners with the orchestra, at others still a relatively backseat presence – needs to be well-focussed. And so it is here, in a recording from December 2020. Captured, like all these works, in vivid surround sound, this performance positively bursts with colour, and the dynamic range and variety of articulation and touch matches the geographic spread of the birdsongs embedded in the work, from North America to South Asia and the Himalayas. In his excellent booklet notes, Nigel Simeone stresses how Messiaen’s free approach to geography in this piece helps ‘to produce a coherent musical whole’. It’s a coherence that’s memorably captured by a group of performers completely on their mettle, sparklingly engaging from start to finish, the timbral differences between bird species wonderfully highlighted.
While both the preceding works have American connections, Schoenberg’s Concerto was actually composed in exile in Los Angeles, but it casts more than a glance back to the old world, not least in the first section, a stylised Viennese waltz. A sinister scherzo, plangent Adagio and sardonically biting finale all give the lie to the belief that twelve-tone music (of which this is a classic example) is incapable of genuine expressive engagement. This February 2021 recording is a marvellously persuasive account, soloist and orchestra working in tandem to bring out a Berg-like level of emotional investment. It sets the seal on another hugely rewarding disc, one in which each work illuminates and is in turn illuminated by the others. The highlight for many may well be the Messiaen, but it’s the programme as a whole and the commitment of all the performers that makes it all so engrossing.
Ravel’s playful, jazz-infused G major Piano Concerto (1929-31, the composer’s penultimate work) and Schoenberg’s 12-tone Piano Concerto, op.42 (1942) – obliquely autobiographical, and dripping with gestures of late-Romanticism – are separated by Olivier Messiaen’s coruscatingly kaleidoscopic Oiseaux exotiques (1955-56), with its brilliant harnessing of birdsong to create a concentrated, coherent concerto in all but name which pushes keyboard virtuosity to wonderful musical extremes. Each of these works is splendidly pithy, the Ravel in the ‘standard’ three movements, Schoenberg in four discrete sections that run continuously, Messiaen in a stunningly colourful single-movement span of 15 minutes. Presented side-by-side like this, they strike the listener as ideally complementary works, and Piemontesi, Nott and the Geneva orchestra highlight the salient individuality of each in turn.
First to be recorded (in November 2020) was the Ravel: a performance that may lack the forensic level of interrogation that Boulez brought to the score in his Cleveland recording with Krystian Zimerman, but injected with real ebullience and a sound-picture that integrates the piano well within the orchestra to create a well-balanced partnership. In the first movement – part-Basque folk idiom, part jazz – the saxophone-like, vibrato-laden solo bassoon is a real ear-catcher, as are the magical textures conjured by harp, woodwind and piano in the chain of cadenzas during the recapitulation. Piemontesi is fabulously dexterous in the outer movements, with the quickfire Presto finale dispatched with an elan that doesn’t obscure its musicality. But it is the central Adagio, with its long, singing lines so evocative of Mozart and its subtle rhythmic interplay, that forms the heart of the performance – a movement regarded as problematic by some commentators, but which silences all criticism here.
Like the Ravel Concerto, the scoring of Messiaen’s Oiseaux exotiques is – aside from a formidable array of percussion – fairly compact. But the work’s particular demands mean that the piano – sometimes the only instrument playing for long stretches, at others equal partners with the orchestra, at others still a relatively backseat presence – needs to be well-focussed. And so it is here, in a recording from December 2020. Captured, like all these works, in vivid surround sound, this performance positively bursts with colour, and the dynamic range and variety of articulation and touch matches the geographic spread of the birdsongs embedded in the work, from North America to South Asia and the Himalayas. In his excellent booklet notes, Nigel Simeone stresses how Messiaen’s free approach to geography in this piece helps ‘to produce a coherent musical whole’. It’s a coherence that’s memorably captured by a group of performers completely on their mettle, sparklingly engaging from start to finish, the timbral differences between bird species wonderfully highlighted.
While both the preceding works have American connections, Schoenberg’s Concerto was actually composed in exile in Los Angeles, but it casts more than a glance back to the old world, not least in the first section, a stylised Viennese waltz. A sinister scherzo, plangent Adagio and sardonically biting finale all give the lie to the belief that twelve-tone music (of which this is a classic example) is incapable of genuine expressive engagement. This February 2021 recording is a marvellously persuasive account, soloist and orchestra working in tandem to bring out a Berg-like level of emotional investment. It sets the seal on another hugely rewarding disc, one in which each work illuminates and is in turn illuminated by the others. The highlight for many may well be the Messiaen, but it’s the programme as a whole and the commitment of all the performers that makes it all so engrossing.
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