Beau Soir: Debussy | Poulenc | Ravel | Satie Album Booklet

Maciej Kułakowski Jonathan Ware

DEBUSSY SATIE RAVEL POULENC

BEAU SOIR

BEAU SOIR

DEBUSSY SATIE RAVEL POULENC

Maciej Kułakowski cello Jonathan Ware piano

1

Claude Debussy (1862–1918)

Beau soir

[2:44]

Sonata for Cello and Piano Prologue Sérénade – Finale

[4:17] [3:15] [3:30]

Minstrels (Préludes, Book I, No 12)

[2:04]

arr. Maciej Kułakowski

Claude Debussy 2 3 4 5

Claude Debussy arr. Maciej Kułakowski & Jonathan Ware

Erik Satie (1866–1925)

Gnossiennes Nos 1–3

arr. Maciej Kułakowski

No 1 No 2 No 3

6 7 8

Maurice Ravel (1875–1937)

[3:46] [2:16] [2:48]

Sonata No 2 in G major [for violin and piano]

arr. Maciej Kułakowski 9 10 11 12

Claude Debussy

I. II. Blues III. Perpetuum mobile

[8:24] [5:38] [3:54]

La plus que lente

[4:35]

Sonata for Cello and Piano Allegro: Tempo di marcia Cavatine Ballabile Finale

[5:45] [6:02] [3:17] [6:42]

Pièce en forme de habanera

[3:24]

arr. Maciej Kułakowski & Jonathan Ware

Francis Poulenc (1899–1963) 13 14 15 16 17

Maurice Ravel Total playing time

[72:31]

An exciting collaboration

Notes on the music

Young Classical Artists Trust (YCAT) has been at the forefront of international artist development since 1984 – nurturing and launching some of the most significant careers on the world stage, including Ian Bostridge, Alison Balsom, the Belcea Quartet, and Delphian artists Sean Shibe and Philip Higham.

Released in August 2020 and already the subject of great acclaim both in the UK press and internationally, recorder player Tabea Debus’s recital album Ohrwurm inaugurated a partnership between Delphian Records and YCAT which the two organisations have specially tailored to offer precious recording opportunities for the most promising young artists. The collaboration unites YCAT’s mission of developing careers at a world-class level with Delphian’s twenty-year reputation for bold, considered programming. From initial concept planning, through recording and editing to the final packaged and digital product, the scheme reflects and enhances both Delphian’s and YCAT’s commitments to nurturing their musicians’ artistic development and long-term careers.

Recorded on 8-10 December 2021 at St Mark’s Episcopal Church, Portobello, Edinburgh Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter 24-bit digital editing: James Waterhouse 24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter

Following on from Tabea Debus, LSO principal oboe Olivier Stankiewicz, longstanding violin/piano duo Benjamin Baker and Daniel Lebhardt, and accordionist Samuele Telari joined the Delphian family with releases in spring and summer 2021. The Castalian String Quartet joined the series in spring 2022 with their recital Between Two Worlds (Lassus – Beethoven – Adès – Dowland ), and the present release is the first of four more YCAT artist portraits to be released across the next two years.The complete collection will offer audiences around the world an engaging and varied series of albums, covering repertoire from the fourteenth century to the present day.

Delphian and YCAT are indebted to the generosity of Alastair and Liz Storey that supports this partnership.

www.ycat.co.uk

Cover image: Kaupo Kikkas Session photography: foxbrushfilms.com Design: John Christ Booklet editor: John Fallas Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK www.delphianrecords.com

@ delphianrecords @ delphianrecords @ delphian_records

It might surprise you to see works such as Ravel’s Violin Sonata on an album of music for cello and piano. But it would not have particularly surprised the composer, nor his contemporaries. In Ravel’s lifetime, arrangements were frequently made at the request of music publishers to widen the potential market of a piece, one example from 1910 being Ravel’s own piano-duet version of Debussy’s Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune.

Ravel also transcribed many solo piano works – both his own and those of earlier composers – for orchestra.

Erik Satie, too, was accustomed to a world where music was adapted to the circumstances of its performance, since he began his musical career as a pianist for the café concert. Working at Montmartre venues such as Le Chat Noir and L’Auberge du Clou, he would accompany singers in witty or satirical numbers which might parody other composers, or he might be part of an ensemble providing a picturesque musical backdrop for multimedia sound and light performances.

His solo piano works such as the early Gnossiennes (1890; the title refers to the ancient Greek site of Knossos) were very little known until the 1910s, when Ravel and the pianist Ricardo Viñes promoted the composer in Paris concert halls as a ‘precursor of genius’.

Debussy, Ravel and Poulenc need no introduction as major French composers of the modern period, and Satie provides a personal link as he knew all three: he met Debussy and Ravel (separately) in the Montmartre café-concert scene, and was a mentor and influential figure for Poulenc in the 1910s. Debussy and Satie were close friends for around thirty years, sharing an interest in popular entertainment – Minstrels, the final piece in Debussy’s first book of piano Préludes (1909–10), is directly inspired by the circus – and both had a taste for sentimental dances enlivened with modish harmonies.

Debussy’s lovely song Beau soir (1880), originally a setting of a poem by Paul Bourget, is a lilting waltz, and La plus que lente (1910) is effectively a ‘more than slow’ waltz, with a typically Debussian conclusion that grows slower and sparser before disappearing. It is as if we are presented with a musical snapshot of something which is timeless and will continue well beyond the boundaries of the concert hall.

Ravel was also acquainted with Satie, and indeed he composed an overt homage to the older composer’s famous Gymnopédies (1888) in his Mother Goose suite (1910–11).

Debussy and Ravel were certainly the two leading figures in French music at the turn of the century. While they were never close

Notes on the music friends, their relationship was initially cordial, but it soured around 1904, almost certainly for personal rather than aesthetic reasons. In that year Debussy separated from his first wife, Lilly, and Ravel and other friends supported her financially for a time after the split, which Debussy viewed as a personal betrayal.

sonata for solo string instrument and piano is, of course, not an unusual compositional choice, but Ravel was not convinced the instruments were natural partners and his aim in the sonata was to explore ‘the basic incompatibility of violin and piano’. He had a point: a string instrument, whether violin or cello, is ideally suited to sustained singing lines, Both Debussy and Ravel drew on Spanish while the piano is essentially a percussion musical models, though Debussy’s Spain was instrument with a huge range. Ravel’s sonata essentially a world of his imagination. Ravel had is dedicated to the composer’s close friend a slightly more direct connection to the country, Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, who advised having been born in Ciboure, only six miles from him extensively on string writing, though the the Spanish border. His beloved mother was premiere performance was given in 1927 by the Basque, and he was always proud of his Basque great Romanian violinist and composer George heritage, though his musical evocations of Spain Enescu, with Ravel at the piano. draw on a wide range of real and imaginary landscapes. Ravel was inspired by Spanish dance Ravel’s extensive tour of the USA and Canada forms, most notoriously in Boléro (1928), which took place in January–April 1928, after the takes the insistent repeated rhythm trope to an sonata was composed, but the second extreme point. There is a similar insistent rhythm movement shows that the influence of in his Pièce en forme de habanera (composed American popular music predates his direct in 1907 for wordless low voice and piano, under experience of US jazz clubs. In this ‘Blues’, the the title Vocalise-Étude, and later arranged solo string instrument morphs into a banjo, or for cello and piano by the composer himself). into a blues singer, and the harmony features For Ravel, Spanish style could be nostalgic, the characteristic flattened notes of blues style. evocative, playful or virtuosic, sometimes all in This movement is flanked by an ‘Allegretto’, the same piece. whose fluid rhythms and interweaving lines make it typical of French neoclassical style, Ravel’s Violin Sonata No 2 (1923–7; his Violin and a super-fast virtuosic ‘Perpetuum mobile’ Sonata No 1 is a single-movement youthful which is all the more challenging when played work that was published posthumously) draws on the cello. In this finale, as often with Ravel, on multiple sources of inspiration. Writing a there is a sinister edge to the constant motion

(as also in, for instance, his orchestral La Valse (1920), and especially its violent conclusion).

Poulenc made a major contribution to the solo repertoire of wind instruments but is not as closely associated with the string family.

Despite this, in the 1940s he composed two major chamber works featuring solo string instruments: a Violin Sonata (1942–3) and Cello Sonata (completed in 1948). The latter was begun in 1940 and is dedicated to the French cellist Pierre Fournier, one of the leading players of his era, who had provided Poulenc with technical advice. Unusually, the sonata is in four movements, each suggesting a dance or song style that evokes an earlier musical period. This situates the sonata firmly in the neoclassical style. We start with an ‘Allegro’ in march time, which is followed by the first song-like movement, ‘Cavatine’.

The title of the third, ‘Ballabile’, suggests a movement in dance style; it has the character of a light-hearted intermezzo with playful wide leaps in the melody line. Perhaps Emmanuel Chabrier was the inspiration here: one of his piano pieces has this title, and Poulenc was so fond of Chabrier that he wrote a short book about him. The lively ‘Finale’ brings us back in part to the world of vocal music, beginning and ending with a recitative-like cello solo.

Towards the end of his life, and under the shadow of the First World War, Debussy

planned a series of six instrumental sonatas for different instrumental formations and completed three of them, the first being for cello and piano. His use of the generic title ‘Sonata’ and his self-description on the cello work’s cover page as ‘musicien français’ suggest a neoclassical shift with an overtly nationalist inflection. Indeed, Debussy wrote to his publisher Jacques Durand in 1915, the year of this first sonata’s composition: I want to work not so much for myself, but to give proof, however small it may be, that not even 30 million boches can destroy French thought.

But not much about the Cello Sonata sounds specifically French. The first movement, labelled ‘Prologue’, starts with an arresting piano introduction that perhaps distantly recalls the French overture. This material is taken up by the cello, and the movement ends with a sudden shift from minor to major (a device known as a tierce de Picardie) which is characteristic of eighteenth-century music. Yet the rhapsodic musical language in between is a world away from French classicism. The following ‘Sérénade’ features cello pizzicati, as if the instrument is imitating a guitar, and pleading droopy gestures that imply the serenade is not having its desired effect. Without a break, the finale completely changes the mood, marked animé, léger et nerveux (‘animated, light and nervy’). Here,

Notes on the music the rhythms and modality give the music a distinctly Hispanic flavour, and its mercurial shifts in character create a unified whole only through Debussy’s own powers of alchemy.

As is further underlined by its short duration, this is far from a traditional sonata.

For Maciej Kułakowski, the three sonatas are the heart of the present programme, each combining elements of a neoclassical outlook with more forward-looking aspects – the inclusion of ‘Spanish’ elements, blues or jazz, Parisian-café atmosphere or ironic humour – which are then picked up in the smaller It is not well known that Debussy’s cello sonata pieces, which thus are ‘like a commentary on was premiered in London in 1916. The Musical them and are linked with their character in one Times reviewer was not impressed: way or another’. Most of all, the sonatas are all highly characteristic of their composers, At a chamber concert given by Mrs Alfred Hobday from Debussy’s mercurial textures to and Mr Warwick Evans on March 4 a new Violoncello Ravel’s passionate classicism and Poulenc’s Sonata by Debussy was a novelty. It did not prove bittersweet harmonic twists. especially interesting, though it was finely played.

Caroline Potter is Visiting Reader in French Music at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire.

A specialist in French music since Debussy, her most recent book, Erik Satie: A Parisian Composer and His World (Boydell Press, 2016), was named Sunday Times Classical Music Book of the Year.

© Kaupo Kikkas

© 2022 Caroline Potter It had a warmer welcome in Paris in March 1917, performed by Joseph Salmon and the composer; this was Debussy’s penultimate appearance as a pianist, only a year before his death.

Biographies Born in Gdańsk in 1996, Maciej Kułakowski began playing the cello at the age of six in the class of Prof Jadwiga Ewald. In 2015, aged nineteen, he won First Prize and a special award at the Lutosławski International Cello Competition. He was a Laureate in the Finals of the 2017 Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels, and a prizewinner at the 2019 YCAT International Auditions in London.

As a soloist Maciej has appeared with the Warsaw Philharmonic, Polish Baltic Philharmonic, Sinfonietta Cracovia, Sinfonia Iuventus, the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, Brussels Philharmonic, St Petersburg Symphony Orchestra, Calgary Philharmonic and AUKSO Chamber Orchestra of Tychy, among many others. Recent highlights include performances of the Schumann concerto with the London Mozart Players, SaintSaëns’ Cello Concerto No 1 with the Polish Baltic Philharmonic and Opole Philharmonic orchestras, Haydn’s Concerto in C with the Koszalin Philharmonic and the Dvořák concerto with the Polish Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra Sopot.

Recitals and chamber music have taken Maciej across Europe and further afield, including the Piatigorsky Cello Festival in Los Angeles, Beijing Cello Festival, and the Penderecki, Lusławice, Lutosławski, Moritzburg, Kronberg, Krzyżowa Music, Hohenstaufen and Munich

Rising Stars Festivals. During the 2021/22 season he gives solo recitals at Wigmore Hall, Kronberg Festival, the Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Konzerthaus Berlin and Laieszhalle Hamburg. He premieres a new work by Anna Rocławska-Musiałczyk in Gdańsk, returns as soloist with the Podlasie, Kielce, Kalisz and Zielona Góra Philharmonic orchestras and records Penderecki’s complete solo cello music.

Sought after as a song accompanist and chamber musician, Jonathan Ware is a regular presence at the world’s leading venues, with recent appearances at Wigmore Hall, Carnegie Hall, the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington DC, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Philharmonie Luxembourg, L’Auditori Barcelona, Concertgebouw Amsterdam, the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Paris and the Pierre Boulez Saal, Berlin.

He has collaborated with Krzysztof Penderecki, Emanuel Ax, Christoph Eschenbach, Viviane Hagner, Charles Neidich, Arnold Steinhardt, Lawrence Power, Kian Soltani and worked with conductors Eivind Gullberg Jensen, Frank Braley, Stéphane Denève and Marek Moś in a wide range of repertoire.

Ware opens the 2021/22 season with a string of dates in the UK alongside violinist Randall Goosby, violist Timothy Ridout and cellist Maciej Kułakowski, performing at St David’s Hall, Cardiff, St George’s Hall, Bristol, Leeds Town Hall and Wigmore Hall. European appearances follow, including at Kölner Philharmonie with countertenor Bejun Mehta, at Staatsoper Unter den Linden and at Festival Lied Würzburg. Meanwhile, performances of a new programme of female composers devised with soprano Golda Schultz take the duo to Philadelphia, San Francisco, London, Berlin, Cologne and Aix-en-Provence.

Maciej completes his studies with Wolfgang Emanuel Schmidt at the Kronberg Academy in 2022, having previously studied with Marcin Zdunik at the Stanisław Moniuszko Academy of Music in Gdańsk, at Mannheim University and at the University of Music Franz Liszt Weimar. He received a scholarship and special prize from the Deutsche Stiftung Musikleben at the Deutscher Musikwettbewerb in 2016, and in 2015 won Second Prize at the TONALI Competition in Hamburg.

Maciej plays on a Thorsten Theis cello from 2014.

A rapidly expanding discography features recordings with baritone Ludwig Mittelhammer for Berlin Classics, mezzosoprano Sharon Carty for Genuin and soprano Elsa Dreisig for Warner Classics, the latter of which garnered particular acclaim for Jonathan’s ‘superbly dappled and delicate

way with the accompaniment’ (Gramophone).

May 2021 saw the release on Delphian of an album of Mozart sonatas with the oboist Olivier Stankiewicz (Delphian DCD34245; ‘Ware is an ever-attentive co-conspirator’ – Gramophone).

Awards include the Pianist’s Prize at both Das Lied International Song Competition and the Wigmore Hall/Kohn Foundation International Song Competition, as well as First Prize with Ludwig Mittelhammer in the International Hugo Wolf Lied Competition.

Born in Texas, Jonathan studied at The Juilliard School in New York and the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler in Berlin and was a prizewinner at the YCAT International Auditions in 2014. He now resides in Berlin, where he teaches at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler and the Barenboim–Said Akademie.

He regularly attends the Verbier Festival Academy, Academia Vocalis and Samling Institute as a mentor.

Also available on Delphian ‘1942’: Prokofiev – Copland – Poulenc (YCAT Vol 3) Benjamin Baker, Daniel Lebhardt

Mozart: Sonatas K 304, K 378 & K 454 (YCAT Vol 2) Olivier Stankiewicz, Jonathan Ware

DCD34247

DCD34245

Since winning First Prize at the 2016 Young Concert Artists International Auditions in New York, New Zealand-born violinist Benjamin Baker has established a presence across the globe, with acclaimed solo, chamber and concerto appearances on five continents. His Delphian recording debut sees him joined by regular duo partner Daniel Lebhardt in a programme of three powerful works which were all begun in 1942.

Each marked in its own way by a world at war, these sonatas show three of the twentieth century’s most individual composers engaging themes of private loss, political uncertainty and music’s enduring ability both to reflect and to transcend circumstance.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the craft of transcription reached its zenith. Popular works such as favourite opera arias were offered to the public in domestically playable versions, and chamber and orchestral works published with alternative scoring options or reworked entirely for different instruments. Thus taking its place in a now somewhat buried tradition that has its roots in the composer’s own time, this cherishable recording by LSO principal oboist Olivier Stankiewicz reimagines three of his best-loved violin sonatas for oboe and piano.

‘Baker and Lebhardt are superb partners, with a rare passion and energy’ — Apple Music, April 2021

‘The expansive K454 and the genial K378 come off exceptionally well …

Jonathan Ware is an ever-attentive co-conspirator’ — Gramophone, August 2021

J.S. Bach: Goldberg Variations (YCAT Vol 4) Samuele Telari accordion

Ohrwurm (YCAT Vol 1) Tabea Debus, Jonathan Rees, Alex McCartney

DCD34257

DCD34243

Samuele Telari’s instrument is essential to his conception of this eternally fresh, kaleidoscopic work. The accordion’s bellows bring out and intensify dynamic contrasts in the slower variations, while the sparkling, faster ones are powered by a pure virtuosity that flows along the two manuals, imitating or chasing one another in resonant stereophony.

Bach’s immortal masterpiece shines with new light here, keyboard dexterity meeting a string-like expressivity, both heightened by Telari’s interpretative subtlety and impeccable control.

Rising talent Tabea Debus makes an immediate impression as she joins the roster of Delphian house artists, coaxing an astonishing spectrum of moods and timbres from an array of Renaissance and Baroque recorders.

Equally astounding is the tightness and responsiveness of her interaction with gamba player Jonathan Rees and lutenist Alex McCartney, while solos for recorder alone bookend the programme chronologically with music from the fourteenth century and the twenty-first.

‘The whole recording is joyful’ — BBC Radio 3 Record Review, July 2021

PRESTO

Editor’s Choice August 2020

‘There’s a lovely sense of affectionate irreverence … Renaissance and Baroque works are despatched with an almost folky exuberance, and it’s a toe-tapping joy’ — Presto Classical, August 2020, EDITOR’S CHOICE

Also available on Delphian Between Two Worlds (YCAT Vol 5) Castalian String Quartet

Origines et départs: French music for clarinet and piano Maximiliano Martín, Scott Mitchell

DCD34272

DCD34280

From the darkness of night emerges day, the cycle of nature tracing the journey of the soul. The finely calibrated emotions of Orlande de Lassus’s song La nuit froide et sombre, and of his near-contemporary John Dowland’s Come, heavy sleep, are made newly vivid in transcriptions by the Castalian String Quartet, framing a programme which exists both inside and beyond time. Profound meditations on immortality and worldliness from Beethoven and Thomas Adès receive readings of extraordinary intensity, the Quartet’s burnished tone and astounding interconnectedness making this a debut that demands to be heard.

Born in the Canary Islands and resident for many years in Scotland, clarinettist Maximiliano Martín here explores the ways in which music can express national character as well as tracking more personal life journeys.

The result is a joyous tour of French repertoire (from the tenderness of Saint-Saëns’s clarinet sonata to the emotional turbulence of Poulenc’s), supplemented by recent works from the two places Martín calls home: exquisite miniatures from the Scottish composer Eddie McGuire and the Tenerife-born Gustavo Trujillo. Maxi’s infectious personality pervades an album that is wholly his own.

‘To hear this music, so full of poetry, joy and sorrow, realised to such perfection, felt like a miracle’ — The Observer, January 2020

‘The performances are strong, at times strikingly intense … large in gesture and scale’ — Gramophone, April 2022

Rachmaninov / Shostakovich: Sonatas for cello and piano Robert Irvine, Graeme McNaught

Cantique de Noël: French music for Christmas from Berlioz to Debussy Choir of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge / Geoffrey Webber

DCD34034

‘Rarely can [the Rachmaninov] have been recorded in a performance of such potent and poetic intensity, intelligence and clarity as that which …

Irvine and his responsive, vital pianist, Graeme McNaught, give here.

Shostakovich’s Cello Sonata is equally well done: poised, subtle and controlled where it needs to be, but appositely pugnacious, brittle and pointed in the scherzo’ — Sunday Times, July 2008 ‘… performances of exhilarating musicality and intimate understanding.

Proof couldn’t be stronger that it’s not always the most marketed names that produce the finest interpretations’ — Classic FM Magazine, September 2008

DCD34197

Geoffrey Webber and his choir have developed a reputation for exploring the unusual, and this album is no exception. A number of traditional French melodies have been adapted over the years to become familiar Christmas fare in English-speaking lands; here, they are heard in their original French arrangements, accompanied by a French-style organ with pungent reeds and powerful string stops. The resulting Romantic fervour is an aspect of Christmas that is sometimes lost amid the Anglo-Saxon tradition of Christmas trees and domestic bliss, and it gives fresh context and meaning to beloved music from Berlioz and his successors.

‘Fervent, engaging, heart-on-sleeve interpretations … vraiment superbe !’

— Choir & Organ, October 2018

DCD34277