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The disc is carried by the commitment of the pianist, Sarah Lavaud, an ardent, young (27 years old) ambassadress for the re-evaluation of the works of Charles Koechlin. The sincerity of intention and the evident subtlety of the musicians at work reveal the French composer’s involved, enchanting universe without misrepresenting it. This superb first disc is a milestone in our discovery of Koechlin.
A bearded dreamer, who assuaged his ecstasy... in music, was also a contemplative, rich in his inner world, but just as able to involve himself in real life: a communist and founder of the Société Musicale Indépendante, Charles Koechlin (1867-1950) gradually established himself as one of the most convinced personalities in France: his highly personal writing awakens the spirit/mind for a conscience multiplied tenfold, an acute vision on the world and Man. Humanistic and generous, Koechlin astonishes, captivates and grips the listener with a profound sense of the radiant sensibility that interferes directly to the heart.
Therein lies his paradox, stemming from music that is apparently contemplative and which, in fine, greatly moves the spirit in a formative experience. The man was profoundly marked by the barbarity of war (First World War), its ignoble slaughter, which is a transgression against the humanist conscience, which we have mentioned. The Third Quartet gives concrete expression to the urgent need to proclaim this heart-rending trauma, especially in the Scherzo, a convulsive peak, flanked by episodes that are more distanced and intimate, indeed secretive, which close up in renunciation or even serenity, on a wound accepted forever, rich in its information.
Quickly given its first performance in Mulhouse in 1924, the work dazzles with its free form, which is simultaneously straightforward, expressive and austere, almost bald. Here we again find this supple counterpoint of lines that sing by themselves and of which Koechlin, a passionate admirer of Gregorian chant, was particularly fond.
The Scherzo is obviously the central piece in this denunciation, which is expressed openly, without mask or measure and even with a sardonic, sarcastic acidity prefiguring the acerbic barbs of Shostakovich: the performers respect the composer’s markings, quoting trumpets and cymbals, which evoke the Grim Reaper and the loathsome machine grinding out cannon fodder. This bitterness and violence are hardly calmed by the C major that opens the following Adagio.
Just as Richard Strauss and his Metamorphosen express a feeling of the end of the world and, above all, the end of civilisation, following the annihilation by bombs and fighting of Second World War, Koechlin, in his Piano Quintet, Op.80, offers a similar experience: the radical situation of a witness to the ignominy whose music produces this cathartic, awaited and hoped-for liberation, the source of a pacifying serenity. Even though Koechlin was declared unfit for service due to the tuberculosis that he was diagnosed with c.1880, the composer experienced the upheavals of war in his flesh, and few works of music have been as committed by their subject.
Our musicians have clearly understood this: refinement of accents, scrupulous concern for the crepuscular, meditative atmospheres, a swaying between the critical desire of estrangement and this direct, expressionistic cry; an expression of the feeling of helplessness and gnawing anxiety, which finally dissipates in a triumphant finale, luminous and even dance-like (imbued with a powerful, re-creative ‘joy’)—did Koechlin, in spite of his painful compassion, remain an eternal optimist?—are so many contributions, which, by the richness of the interpretative gesture, reveal every facet of the writing, first performed in Brussels in 1934.
The suspended slowness (first movement) concretely expresses the destitution and humility of the beings sacrificed to horror, their anguished wait towards a dawn of barbarous, bloody lightning. Long phrases stretched to breathlessness, stifled visions in a thick, asphyxiating fog: the instrumentalists’ quality goes to the heart of one of the composer’s most innovative, most poetic tableaux: languor, exhaustion, the wearing-out of vital forces...
The horror becomes even more concrete in the second movement, a scherzo plunged into the centre of the onslaughts, which denounces the open wounds (as is further underscored by the title of the episode: ‘The wound’. The same floating stretching of the andante, but enrobed in a prophetic colour, now entitled ‘Consoling Nature’... Here is the distanced Koechlin, tender and even lyrical, whose music comforts, rocks and enchants.
The disc is carried by the commitment of the pianist, Sarah Lavaud, an ardent, young (27 years old) ambassadress for the re-evaluation of the works of Charles Koechlin. The sincerity of intention and the evident subtlety of the musicians at work (the very convincing pianist is surrounded by the four women of the Antigone Quartet) reveal the French composer’s involved, enchanting universe without misrepresenting it. At its source, the creators of the Groupe du Six, and Messiaen, blossom... That just shows the value of his musical heritage. This superb first disc is a milestone in our discovery of Koechlin, poet and prophet, haunted visionary and clairvoyant enchanter.
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The Obscure Wait of What shall be…
