To be nastily cynical, this looks like
a neat way of getting extra mileage
out of recordings which have probably
sold all they’re going to. But, given
the premises, I must say it’s well done.
Hugh Griffith provides
a useful introduction to the life and
work of Cézanne and four paintings
from various stages of his career are
reproduced as well as the size of a
CD booklet allows. The outer covers
also have details from a further two,
including a self-portrait. He then follows
with an equally informative account
of the music being written in France
during the painter’s lifetime. The pieces
chosen to illustrate this are reasonable
and not always the obvious ones, though
the implicit suggestion that Boëllmann
and Vierne are of more moment than Massenet,
Franck, Gounod or Saint-Saëns is
a surprising one. It could be retorted
that the music of the first three has
even less congruity with Cézanne’s
art than some of the others included,
but the dry neo-classicism of some Saint-Saëns
surely points further towards the future
than you might imagine. The Boëllmann
ought at least to be a pleasant surprise
but the Vierne is one of the more turgid
pieces from an uneven opus: why not
the evocative "Arabesque"
or the rousing "Carillon"?
The booklet concludes with a chronology,
setting important dates from Cézanne’s
biography alongside the major literary
and musical events. There is no attempt
to draw parallels between Cézanne’s
painting and the music of his time and
it is here, I think, that the enterprise
reveals itself to be based on false
premises.
Supposing the likely
purchaser to be someone who frequents
art exhibitions rather more than the
concert hall and is attracted by the
idea of filling in his background knowledge,
he is going to be struck by just how
little the music here parallels the
painting. First we have Berlioz, big-boned
and romantic; he could easily be illustrating
paintings by Guéricault or Delacroix.
Then we have Bizet whose sun-drenched
Provence landscape ought to be a close
parallel with Cézanne’s own,
and yet it is not: rather, it basks
in a Corot-like glow, populated by Millet’s
peasants. Only at the very end, with
Ravel’s sharply-chiselled textures (perhaps
anticipated by Chabrier), do we find
anything resembling ideals in common
with Cézanne.
The truth is that musicians
tend to live rather isolated lives and,
while literature and painting tend to
move together, music follows about thirty
years afterwards. Take any artistic
movement you like – baroque, neo-classical,
romantic – and it is the same story.
Here we are talking about impressionism
and the fundamental dates are for impressionist
painting are:
1863: Salon des
Refusés
1874: A collective
exhibition following which the critic
Leroy invented the term impressionism
as a term of abuse. Instead,
the word stuck. Cézanne exhibited
at both of these.
The corresponding
movement in literature was symbolism.
Some important dates are:
1857: Baudelaire:
Fleurs du mal (the seminal influence)
1865: Mallarmé:
Prélude à l’après-midi
d’un faune
1869: Verlaine:
Fêtes Galantes
1873: Rimbaud:
Une Saison en enfer
In music, the dates
to remember are:
1894: Debussy:
Prélude à l’après-midi
d’un faune (so it took nearly thirty
years for Mallarmé’s poem
to find a musical equivalent)
1901: Ravel: Jeux
d’eau (the first piano piece to
use the manner and textures we now
recognise as impressionist)
But hey, I’m talking
about impressionism and it’s true that
Cézanne exhibited with the impressionists
from the beginning, but his aims were
always different and he left them to
go his own way. Art critics label him
a post-impressionist; Matisse and Picasso
saw him as the father of modern painting.
His concern to reduce landscapes to
their underlying geometrical structure
(clearly illustrated in the booklet)
had no more to do with Debussy than
it did with Renoir or Monet; it has
slight parallels with the more neo-classical
Ravel, but for music which shares Cézanne’s
ideals you must look far ahead, to post-Rite
Stravinsky and even to Webern.
I feel, therefore,
that the premises of this disc are unsound.
But if you don’t agree it is, as I said
at the beginning, very nicely done.
The performances are all adequate though
it would be idle to suggest that Rahbari’s
Debussy, for example, ranks with the
best. Still, it is politely read and
does no damage. The performance of the
Satie is thankfully not too lugubrious.
I had to turn the volume up when I got
to the Debussy. Perhaps if I had turned
it down again when I came to the Ravel
I would not have thought Thiollier’s
performances a little heavy-handed.
Christopher Howell
