VoltEleven years ago, the equally tasteful and expressive Polish pianist Ewa Kupiec released a CD dedicated to the music of Fryderyk Chopin. Her Polish title is “Żal”. This word can have many meanings: regret, sadness, disappointment, painful sadness. Chopin himself used this to describe the basic tone of his music and his complicated relationship with the Polish motherland. He left Poland at the age of twenty. In “Żal”, Chopin feels grief for the loss of his homeland, angry for Poland’s humiliation, and at the same time despise the narrowness of intellectuals within and below Poland. His companion in exile in Paris, the poet Adam Mickiewicz, reduced his relationship with his fellow Polish compatriots to this formula: “Everything is for you, nothing to do with you”.
Now, “Żal” appears again as the title of the CD, written by the Sony Classical label, without corresponding special Polish characters. This album is composed by the French pianist Lucas Debargue. He is unique in art, extremely talented, and often has whimsical ideas. It is dedicated to the Polish composer and pianist Mi Miłosz Magin and Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer and his chamber orchestra Kremerata Baltica. Magin was born in Łódź in 1929 and died in Paris in 1999, where he spent most of his life. He wrote in the pamphlet that Debargue learned about Magin’s music through his first piano teacher, Christine Muenier.
It is worth noting that the pianist’s memory of Mounier was so cordial. De Bagh, who finished fourth in the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in the summer of 2015, did not talk very well about France and its piano tradition in an earlier interview. Like the agents trained by Dostoevsky, Debagh praised Russia’s kindness and profound soul, and for many years despised his Western ancestry. Now we know that his teacher Rena Schereschewskaja made him famous in Moscow, and he obviously wanted to exert too much influence on the further career planning of her students, which is why he is getting away from her.
Magin’s French and Polish music recorded by Debag now is a typical art genre, which is now considered “contemporary” and penetrates the vacuum of avant-garde art. International styleWho deliberately erased their origin. Pianists Daniil Trifonov, Michail Pletnjow, and Evgeni Kissin also composed such music; De Barge himself hinted that he wanted to do the same. It is tonal, nostalgic music, trying to start where Rachmaninov, Prokofiev or Planck stopped: music of nostalgia and excuses, especially what has happened since then. The “Country Concerto” of violin, strings and timpani begins like a neoclassical Prokofiev, in which a gorgeous chanson writer places a dream of pain relief before the motor skills of forcing energy erupt again. All of this features the Polish dance Krakowiak. If this optimistic folklore came from the Soviet Union, it would be “Music of the Composers Association”.
Magin is the best there, just like Francis Planck, he is associated with Chanson or the music of Maurice Ravel and Gabriel Faure in “Improvisation”. The Violin and Piano Introductory Andante of 1963 is a moving sadness flowing inward, like the will of Jehan Alain who died young in the war. Debargue and Kremer also played this music with a subtle, calm etiquette, avoiding excessive appropriation through sentimentality.
This CD is a manifestation of self-unhappiness and must be taken seriously: it tells-although a little comfortable-the modern experience of being far from home and the inability to find a sense of security in a musical. So you reluctantly yearn for the sweetness of yesterday.
