Hommage
Jean Absil (1893-1974)
Concert à cinq, Op 38 (1939)
Jacques Pillois (1877-1935)
Cinq Haï-Kaï: epigrammes lyrique du Japon (1926)
Aleksander Tansman (1897-1986)
Sonatina da camera (1952)
Jean-Yves Daniel-Lesur (1908-2002)
Suite médiévale (1945)
Cracow Harp Quintet
rec. 2021, Przemyśl, Poland
First recording (Pillois)
DUX 1871 [51]
The Hommage in the title of this disc is to the Quintette Instrumentale de Paris (founded by the flautist René le Roy (1898-1965) and the composers associated with it. This is a rich vein that the Cracow Harp Quintet might productively mine a great deal further – other composers who wrote pieces for the Quintette Instrumentale include Vincent d’Indy (Suite en Partie, 1927), Gabriel Pierné (Variations libres et Final, 1932) and Jean-Michel Damase (Quintette, Opus 2, 1948). The repertoire of the Quintette Instrumentale also included works by, among others, Yvonne Desportes, Honegger, Koechlin, Ibert, Malipiero, Ropartz, Henri Tomasi, Marcel Tournier and Villa-Lobos. There must, I am sure, be many other composers I have overlooked. None of this would matter if the Cracow Harp Quintet didn’t, on the evidence of this CD, play this music as well as they do. Their work here has a panache and sophistication that sound authentically Parisian.
The four composers whose work is represented on this disc are not, I suppose, major names, though Tansman and Daniel-Lesur are more widely known than Absil and Pillois. All, however, are composers who maintain high standards of both musicianship and musical imagination and write subtle, well-schooled music.
Jean Absil was born in the Belgian village of Bon-Secours, close to the French border. From 1913 he studied organ and composition at the Brussels Conservatory. His tastes seem originally to have been inclined towards late-Romantic music. However, a shift of emphasis began with his exposure to the series of ‘Concerts Pro Arte’ organised in Brussels, from 1921/22, by Paul Collaer. The Pro Arte Quartet and the musicians who collaborated with them effectively introduced Absil to the music of – inter alia – Milhaud, Roussel, Berg, Hindemith, Stravinsky, Bartók, Schoenberg and Koechlin. Absil subsequently spent some years in Paris where he gravitated towards the music, and often the friendship, of figures such as Ibert, Milhaud (and other members of the so-called École de Paris like Tansman, Tibor Harsanyi and Marcel Mihalovici). Absil absorbed many influences and sometimes his work can seem overfull of echoes of other composers. Behind all the names already mentioned was that of Ravel – “If there is a master whose influence on his work cannot be denied it is certainly Maurice Ravel” (Albert Vander Linden and Barry S. Brook, ‘Belgium from 1914 to 1964’, The Musical Quarterly, 51:1, 1965, pp.92-96. Quotation from p.24.). Although some of these various influences can be heard in his Concert à cinq they certainly do not overwhelm Absil’s own voice. Consider, for example, the opening ‘Introduction et Allegro’, which makes use of lucidly organised repeats in a way one might sensibly call ‘neoclassical’, though there are also harmonic subtleties and riches which irresistibly make one think of Ravel. It is, in short, the work of a man who has listened to both Stravinsky and Ravel but cannot simply be described as a ‘disciple’ of either. The ‘meaning’ of the music exists in the interplay of these two ‘influences’. The languor of the Andante which follows makes one think of some aspects of Ravel – even if there is an unRavelian astringency in some of the writing for the flute. Of the closing ‘Final’, Darusz Marciniszyn aptly observes, in his booklet notes, that “the whole movement may bring involuntary associations with rhythm-driven finales of Neoclassical works from the first decades of the 20th century”.
Born in Paris, Jacques Pillois was somewhat older than his three fellow-composers on this disc: sixteen years older than Absil, twenty years older than Tansman and 31 years older than Daniel-Lesur. He studied with Widor and Vierne and subsequently taught at the Fontainebleau Conservatory before accepting, around 1928/9 a teaching post at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. He died in New York in January 1935. His Cinq Haï-Kaï (Five Haiku) respond to, and take part in, the artistic movement which has become known as japonisme; the great fashion for, and fascination with, the arts of Japan which began after the opening up of Japan to the West after about 1850. Japonisme was most prominent in the visual arts - see, for example, Frank Whitford’s Japanese Prints and Western Painters (London and New York, 1977). Van Gogh was only the most famous French artist to be fascinated by Japanese art – as discussed in Janet A. Walker’s article ‘Van Gogh, Collector of Japan’ (The Comparatist, 32, 2008, pp.82-114), other prominent artists included Degas, Whistler, Bonnard, Toulouse-Lautrec and Manet (who built up an extensive collection of Japanese prints.
European poets were also fascinated by things Japanese. In 1905 the philosopher and poet Paul-Luis Couchoud (1879-1959), who had visited Japan from September 1903 to May 1904, published (in a limited edition), a short book called Au fil de l’eau (Along the water). It was made up of French poems modelled on the Japanese poetic form of the haiku, written by Couchoud and two of his friends André Faure (a painter) and Albert Pocin (a sculptor) as the three men made a trip along the French canals (as well as being a reference to the canal journey the book’s title may also be an allusion to the Japanese term Ukiyo-e (Pictures of the Floating World) used to identify art which depicted the transient world of everyday life. In 1906, Couchoud published Les Épigrammes lyriques du Japan, followed by Sages et poètes d’Asia (1916). A modern collection of his haikus was published in 2004 Paris, by Fayard/Mille et une nuits) under the title Au fil de l'eau: Les premiers haïku français (1905- 1922) edited by Éric Dussert.
The self-exiled American poet Ezra Pound was frequently in Paris in the first two decades of the twentieth century and it may have been under the influence of French japonisme that he became interested in the haiku (the Japanese poetic form which uses just 17 syllables). It is the obvious model for his poem ‘In a Station of the Metro’, first published in 1913. It was originally written in Paris in 1911 as a poem of thirty lines; after several revisions it reached its published form, just two lines long, and made up of only fourteen words: Pound described it as a “hokku-like sentence”. The poem certainly has a brevity and dependence on the power of the image which make it close kin to the haiku. In Pound’s creation of what was called ‘imagism’, in effect the first Modernist movement in poetry, Japanese models were again important – when in London, Pound studied Japanese prints in the British Museum.
Thus, there was a rich cultural context for a work such as Pillois’ Cinq Haï-Kaï. In more purely musical terms, he may well have been familiar with such works as Stravinsky’s Trois Poésies de la lyrique japonaise (1913) or Maurice Delage’s Sept haïs-kaïs (1924), though they are vocal works while his is purely instrumental. Delage was one of Ravel’s few pupils and in this context it is interesting to note that the American musicologist Jessica Stankis has found japonisme a fruitful context for the discussion of Ravel’s music – in her 2012 Ph.D. thesis (University of California, Santa Barbara), Maurice Ravel as Miniaturist: through the lens of japonisme and at least one article (there may be others of which I am unaware) – ‘Maurice Ravel’s “Color Counterpoint” through the Perspective of Japonisme’, Music Theory Online, 21(1), March 2015.
Jacques Pillois’ ‘Five Haikus’ have the brevity of their literary ‘model’ – the longest runs for well under four minutes, the shortest are barely one and a half-minute long. The five carry the following titles: ‘Prière d’orphelin’ (Orphan’s prayer), ‘Jour de l’An Japonais’ (Japanese New Year’s Day), ‘Chagrin d’amour’ (Pain of Love), ‘Solitude (Aubade à la lune’ (Solitude, dawn song to the moon) and ‘Rêves de guerriers morts’ (Dreams of dead warriors). But for all their brevity these pieces, as their titles suggest, have a degree of explicit emotion, even emotionalism, that is alien to the Japanese haiku. Despite that, these are attractive miniatures of real elegance, with some striking changes of mood – the hushed and respectful ‘Prière’ succeeded by the jaunty celebration of ‘Jour de l’An’, the pained melancholy of ‘Chagrin’ and the sense of awakening in ‘Solitude’ before closing with the disturbed oneiric world of ‘Rêves’. The Cracow Harp Quntet finds just the right idiom for this music, respecting the emotions expressed in it, but refusing to treat any of those emotions indulgently. As elsewhere on the disc, the sense of ensemble unity is striking – though the flute of Amelia Lewandowska-Wojtuch is especially deserving of praise in these readings of Pillois’ Cinq Haï-Kaï.
Born in Lodz in Poland, Aleksander Tansman studied with Piotr Rytel (1884-1970) in Warsaw, before moving to Paris in 1919. Paris remained his base thereafter (he took French citizenship in 1937), save for a spell in Hollywood (where he wrote film music), on the fall of Paris to the Germans. He had a career as a pianist and conductor alongside his life as a composer. After his move to France, he was much influenced by the musical examples provided by Stravinsky and Ravel, though his origin as a Polish Jew kept his music distinct from that of either of these exemplars. So, for example, this ‘Sonatine da camera’, commissioned by a French radio station in 1952, one might readily expect (from its title) to be a typical piece of French neoclassicism, but the more one listens to it the more one hears the horror of a Polish Jew at what was done to the Jews of his homeland a few years earlier. In the 1940s Tansman’s work had often responded to the events of World War II; so, for example, his Rhapsodie Polonaise of 1944 was dedicated to those who tried to defend the ghetto in Warsaw against the Nazis. In the years either side of 1952, when this ‘Sonatine’ was written Tansman’s music was frequently very explicitly ‘Jewish’ in subject and/or idiom, as in his oratorio Isaiah the Prophet (1950) and Prologue et Cantate (1958) with its texts from Ecclesiastes. It seems to me that this much smaller work, the ‘Sonatine’ registers that same response to the events of the war which made Tansman ever more conscious of being a Polish Jew. It is in three short movements (the whole is less than fourteen minutes long) – ‘Introduction et Allegro’, ‘Notturno’ and ‘Scherzo’. The first movement begins with some ominous low chords, before sharp Stravinsky-like rhythmic emphases add greater bite to ambiguous passages which are neither entirely uncomfortable nor wholly comfortable. The control of dynamics displayed here by the Cracow Harp Quintet is exemplary and the work of harpist Adrian Nowak is especially worthy of praise. A movement headed ‘Notturno’ might seem to promise nocturnal ‘peace’. Certainly, the tempo slows down and the volume is lower, but there is an all-pervading unease in the music. The closing Scherzo (this scherzo is no joke!) resolves none of the ambiguities, being a complex movement of many twists and turns in which many different emotions – anger, even horror, troubled memory and elegiac reflection and memory find expression (there are also moments of what seems to be a kind of desperately forced humour) - a work which largely hides the fact that it articulates a response to a dreadful period in the history of the composer and his people.
In a brief entry in his Companion to 20th Century Music (1992), Norman Lebrecht is abruptly dismissive of Daniel-Lesur: “Midway man in French music, he joined Messiaen in the Jeune France movement but retreated in his only opera Andrea del Sarto (Marseilles, 23.i. 69) to wagnerizing Pelleas”. There is, however, a good deal more to Daniel-Lesur and his music than Lebrecht seems willing to acknowledge (and Berlioz would surely be an apter point of reference than Wagner in discussing Andrea del Sarto?), including a greater continuity of imaginative vision and musical language. Daniel-Lesur’s mother Alice Lesur (née Thibout) studied composition with the organist-composer Charles Tournemire (1870-1939) and he was also her son’s most influential teacher. Tournermire’s fascination with the modal systems of plainsong was rarely absent for long from Daniel-Lesur’s music and can reasonably be thought of as giving an underlying unity to his work as a composer. It is fundamental to the success of his masterwork, the a cappella Le Cantique des Cantiques (1952) and it is also a key element in his Suite médiévale, most obviously in the first of its five movements, ‘Monodie’. Harmony is more important, by way of contrast, in the third piece, ‘Symphonie’.
Between these two comes the most intriguing piece of the suite, ‘L’Ange au sourire’. Unlike the four other pieces which make up this Suite médiévale (‘Monodie’, ‘Symphonie’, ‘Complainte’ and ‘Danse’), ‘L’Ange au sourire’ doesn’t carry a title referencing a specific medieval form or genre; its reference (The smiling angel) is to a beautiful sculpted figure of the thirteenth century (see
image), near the north portal on the west façade of Reims Cathedral. It was badly damaged by German bombing and a subsequent fire in 1914, with its head being separated from the body. The fragments were collected and preserved and, with the assistance of reference to an earlier cast in the Museum of French Monuments, the figure was restored and returned to its original place in 1926. Some saw the story of its destruction and restoration as an emblem of French culture’s strength in the face of German ‘barbarism’. Daniel-Lesur’s music captures both the smile and the strength. The ‘Complaint(e)’ is more often met as a literary rather than a musical term. However, given how frequently poems were sung, the language of the two arts was readily interchanged. The ‘complainte’ could be a satirical observation on the follies or evils of society or the would-be-persuasive expression of a lover’s unhappiness at the beloved’s continued refusal of the offered love. Daniel-Lesur’s ‘Complainte’, sweetly melancholy, is clearly of the second kind. It has a pleasingly elegant courtliness. That same courtliness and elegant charm are evident in the ‘Danse’ which closes the Suite. This is very much a courtly dance rather than a folk dance. The whole suite is charming, and no doubt presents an idealised view of the Middle Ages; in purely musical terms, however, Daniel-Lesur’s knowledge of medieval music is real enough and there’s nothing of the fantasy about his Suite médiévale.
This excellent quintet of young Polish musicians gives an impressive performance of each of these four works; in their performances, the five instruments complement one another perfectly and the resulting textures and colours are assured, subtle and various. Evidently, it is all very well-prepared and considered without ever sounding over-rehearsed. The recorded sound is excellent. This line up, of harp, flute and string trio is an inherently attractive one, offering many interesting possibilities to a composer. It has a decent repertoire already (though a lot of works are very rarely played), but there is plenty of room for new works. Whether playing existing works or new ones, I look forward to hearing the Cracow Harp Quintet again.
Glyn Pursglove
Previous review: Rob Barnett
Performers
Amelia Lewandowska-Wojtuch (flute), Adrian Nowak (harp), Maria Garstecka (violin), Jan Czyżewski (viola), Paweł Czarakcziew (cello)
