Lewis Wickline

John Anderson performs “Hommage à Rameau”, the second of Debussy’s series of Images, book 1. Debussy’s Images, finished in 1905, are among the most masterful pieces he wrote for the piano, and have become central to pianists’ repertoire. While composing them, he wrote to his publisher, Durand, that he was creating these pieces “with a completely new approach and in accordance with the most recent findings of harmonic chemistry”, and later asked him “Have you played the Images? Without undue vanity, I believe that these three pieces can hold their own and will assume a place in the piano literature… to the left of Schumann or the right of Chopin… as you like it.” (trans. taken from preface of Henle edition of score). Hommage à Rameau is based on a melody taken from Jean Philippe Rameau’s “Castor et Pollux”, and is a tribute to this great baroque forefather of French music and style. It harkens back to an old courtly dance–the sarabande–but innovates its form and harmonizes it according to his most modern “harmonic chemistry”. However, he maintains its introspective, melancholic character without exception. Just as Mallarmé and the symbolist poets were making poetry not of ideas, but of just words, the “musicien français” was creating musical meaning not out of linear development or progression, but out of a static juxtaposition of sound events, with musical sense inherent in sonorous effect, a triumph of art for art’s sake. Debussy, in spite of his Germanic …

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Saint-Saëns is a well-known composer. In the nineteenth century he was also well-known as a virtuoso pianist, ranked alongside giants such as Liszt, Clara Schumann, Pugno, Pachmann, Planté, Grieg and Rubinstein. Fortunately, a few performances of his have been preserved on early records. These demonstrate a quite astounding virtuosity in the classic nineteenth century French style (crisp, cultured, refined, charming and without as much rubato as the German school). Amazingly, even though he was getting quite old by the time he recorded, there is no apparent lack of technique or interpretative quality in the recordings (unlike, for example, and unfortunately, the recordings of his great contemporary Francis Planté). The recordings of Saint-Saëns are important as Saint-Saëns has the honour of being the oldest pianist to record at all. Sadly he was restricted to mostly salon-style works in his recordings, and he only recorded his own works. What we would give for a little Liszt or Chopin… This recording is an abridged version of his “Rhapsodie d’Auvergne” op.73, given a truly awe-inspiring, rhythmically firey performance recorded in 1904.

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John Anderson performs “Poissons d’or”, the last of Debussy’s second book of Images. Just like the Impressionist painters’ fascination with depicting glittering light plays on water, with “Poissons d’or” (Goldfish), one has the indisputable image of a bunch of little fish darting around under the ripples of a fountain. It is said to have been inspired by a Japanese lacquer painting of goldfish that hung in his studio, and it is a fun and exhilarating finish to the series. Just as Mallarmé and the symbolist poets were making poetry not of ideas, but of just words, the “musicien français” was creating musical meaning not out of linear development or progression, but out of a static juxtaposition of sound events, with musical sense inherent in sonorous effect, a triumph of art for art’s sake. Debussy, in spite of his Germanic conservatory training, managed to refocus attention to the actual sound event, and it was thus largely he who provided the gateway to modern music; Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartok, and Berg all acknowledged their great debt to him. If one were to look for his equivalent in painting, Debussy could be called an “impressionist” composer, though he himself preferred the term “symbolist”. “If there is Impressionism in music”, Oscar Thompson writes in his book on Debussy, “Reflets dans l’eau is one of the most perfect examples of it.” Whether his music refers to or suggests something outside it (as Debussy said, “suggérer, c’est le rêve”), the music is never a …

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John Anderson performs “Cloches à travers les feuilles”, the first of Debussy’s second book of Images. Debussy dedicated “Cloches à travers les feuilles” (“Bells sounding across the leaves”) to his friend, the sculptor Alexandre Charpentier, who was a master of miniature reliefs and was part of the movement towards the Art Nouveau. The piece, entirely understated, is a like a miniature landscape itself, or a bas-relief in sound. There is only one bar marked forte, of which only three notes are fortissimo. The rest of the piece never rises above mezzo piano. According to the critic Laloy (to whom the second of this series was dedicated), the piece suggests the “deathknell resounding from Vespers on All Saints’ Day to the funeral mass on All Soul’s Day and traversing, from village to village, the yellowing autumnal forests in the silence of eventide” (trans. from preface of Henle edition). The opening bars present to us these melancholic tolling bells, calling and responding from three different directions it seems. The opening four bars are basically geometric in construction and the music is abstracted entirely from a research into pure tone quality itself, with the timbre of each note carefully articulated with a unique combination of marks in the score. We have four strata of entirely independent sonorities, but all constrained within a pianissimo. Such rarefied textures, finding means of expression on the very edge of silence, would become very frequent characteristics …

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John Anderson performs “Mouvement”, the third and last of Debussy’s series of Images, book 1. Debussy’s Images, finished in 1905, are among the most masterful pieces he wrote for the piano, and have become central to pianists’ repertoire. While composing them, he wrote to his publisher, Durand, that he was creating these pieces “with a completely new approach and in accordance with the most recent findings of harmonic chemistry”, and later asked him “Have you played the Images? Without undue vanity, I believe that these three pieces can hold their own and will assume a place in the piano literature… to the left of Schumann or the right of Chopin… as you like it.” (trans. taken from preface of Henle edition of score). Mouvement is a lively perpetuum mobile, based on the very limited material of an open fifth encompassing a series of fast semiquaver triplets, repeated without respite from beginning to end. More playful than Reflets or Hommage, it brings the first book of his Images to a exuberant end, until finally evaporating into nothingness at the extreme ends of the keyboard. Just as Mallarmé and the symbolist poets were making poetry not of ideas, but of just words, the “musicien français” was creating musical meaning not out of linear development or progression, but out of a static juxtaposition of sound events, with musical sense inherent in sonorous effect, a triumph of art for art’s sake. Debussy, in spite of his Germanic conservatory training, managed to …

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John Anderson performs “Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut”, the second of Debussy’s second book of Images. This movement (“And the Moon Descends on the Temple that is no more”) Debussy dedicated to his friend, the critic and musicologist, Louis Laloy, who would later become one of his biographers. The piece frequently uses harmonies based on seconds, exotic scales, and parallel 4ths and 5ths to suggest, as Oscar Thompson put it, “the mystery of things ancient and immobile, as in a world that has been drugged and left behind”. If in Cloches there is the suggestion of Vesper bells, here we are given much more the flavor of the Balinese gamelan. The harmonies are somehow hollow sounding, and even if the music somehow moves we have the impression of complete stasis, like the ancient pillars of a ruined temple. The loudest phrases only reach a piano marking, the rest entirely contained within a pianissimo: it hovers even closer to the edge of silence than did Cloches. It is only a dream image of a temple so ancient and remote that we enter the land of the mythical. Just as Mallarmé and the symbolist poets were making poetry not of ideas, but of just words, the “musicien français” was creating musical meaning not out of linear development or progression, but out of a static juxtaposition of sound events, with musical sense inherent in sonorous effect, a triumph of art for art’s sake. Debussy, in spite of his Germanic conservatory training, managed to refocus attention to …

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2008 Annual Concert at Glenn Gould Studio Toronto Soloist:Emily Pei’En Fan Conductor: Tony Fan with Chinese Artists Society of Toronto Youth Orchestra

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