Augustin Dumay © Thibault Daguzan
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Jean-Philippe Collard Augustin Dumay © Thibault Daguzan Special thanks to Augustin Dumay, Flagey, Bernard de Launoit Symphonie espagnole: Recording: 16-17 January 2011, Lutoslawski Hall (Polski Radio), Warsaw – Producer: Michel Stockhem – Recording, editing & mastering: Julita Emanuilow – Sonate, Arlequin, Guitare: Recording: 19-20 September 2011, Flagey (Studio 1), Brussels – Producer, recording, editing & mastering: Aline Blondiau – Cover: Nikita Boriso-Glebsky – Design: mpointproduction – Executive Producer: Frederik Styns 2 EDOUARD LALO (1823-1892) Symphonie espagnole op. 21 pour violon et orchestre 1_ Allegro non troppo 7’32 2_ Scherzando: Allegro molto 4’22 3_ Intermezzo: Allegretto non troppo 6’22 4_ Andante 6’31 5_ Rondo: Allegro 8’34 Sonate op. 12 pour violon et piano 6_ Allegro moderato 7’01 7_ Variations 6’03 8_ Rondo 3’51 9_ Arlequin, esquisse humoristique s. op. pour violon et piano 3’18 10_ Guitare op. 28 pour violon et piano 3’24 Total time 57’01 Nikita Boriso-Glebsky, violin Sinfonia Varsovia / Augustin Dumay, dir. (1-5) Jean-Philippe Collard, piano (6-10) 3 English This recording of the Symphonie espagnole and chamber music works by Lalo is yet another result of the long-standing and intensive collaboration between the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel and Fuga Libera. Augustin Dumay proposed setting up a project with a wonderful young Russian violinist he had been coaching at the Music Chapel for several years, Nikita Boriso-Glebsky. At a dazzling tempo a whole team was being mobilised around this young talent and around Augustin Dumay, the driving force and conductor of this adventure: * a top orchestra, Sinfonia Varsovia, with which the Music Chapel collaborates regularly * a very experienced producer and artistic director, Michel Stockhem * Jean-Philippe Collard, a fi ne pianist, who champions less well-known chamber repertoire * and fi nally, our loyal partner Flagey. In a spirit of friendship, we wish to acknowledge and thank everyone involved. Nikita Boriso-Glebsky is a violinist at the start of a very promising career, and the recording will document this moment for future generations of music lovers. BERNARD DE LAUNOIT EXECUTIVE PRESIDENT QUEEN ELISABETH MUSIC CHAPEL 4 SYMPHONIE ESPAGNOLE – SONATE – ARLEQUIN – GUITARE Edouard Lalo’s youth was for a long time seen through the distorting lens of his admiring son, the prominent music critic Pierre Lalo (1866-1943), who created a legend: Spanish ancestry dating back to Renaissance times (those of Charles I of Spain, Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire), a strict and severe military family, a young man at odds with that family… all of which was propagated for a hundred years or so by the most infl uential authors. In reality his youth was a little less extraordinary and much less confl ictual. Born in Lille, Edouard Lalo (1823-1892) learned to play the violin at the Conservatoire there with the violinist and conductor Müller and the violist, cellist and quartettist of German origin, Pierre Louis Baumann; the latter (who also taught another famous musician from Lille, Auguste Franchomme) was reputed to have played with Beethoven in Vienna. Lalo thus learned the art of virtuosity but also the more ‘serious’ repertoire, and he decided to aim for a musical career. In 1839, aged barely sixteen, he moved, despite paternal opposition, to Paris, where he continued to study the violin with Pierre Baillot, then François-Antoine Habeneck, and began to study composition with the Prague-born pianist Julius Schulhoff (great-uncle of the twentieth-century composer Erwin Schulhoff), later continuing with the young Calais-born composer Joseph Crèvecœur (winner of the Second Prize in the prestig- ious Prix de Rome competition in 1847). Clearly Lalo’s teachers had no connection with Southern Europe! His triumphant return to Lille, where in 1843 he performed a concerto by Viotti, with Müller conducting, made him into a local celebrity. It now remained for him to make a name for himself in Paris. In no time Lalo was making his fi rst attempts at composition: romances in the man- ner of the day, mostly infl uenced by his teachers and their admiration for Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and Mendelssohn, rather than Bellini, Donizetti and Meyerbeer. His fi rst chamber compositions, also dating from that time, had little impact. In 1855 he joined with Jules Armingaud (violin) and Léon Jacquard (cello) in the establishment of a quartet under Armingaud’s leadership, in which he played the viola fi rst of all, but 5 switched very soon to second violin. That famous pioneering quartet is remembered, amongst other things, for its concerts in quintet with Clara Schumann. For the next ten years Lalo earned his living as an instrumentalist and a private teacher, composing nothing else until after his marriage. In 1865, at the age of forty-two, Edouard Lalo married one of his students, a young woman from a noble Breton family, Julie Bernier de Maligny, who had a remarkable contralto voice and loved to sing the lieder of Schubert and Schumann. She brought Lalo fi nancial stability and fresh hopes. Believing in his genius, she encouraged him to return to composition and fi red him with an interest in art songs and opera. The following year he made an unsuccessful attempt at opera with Fiesque (1866-67, based on a play by Schiller), entered for a competition in which it failed to win a prize; then came Le Roi d’Ys (1875-87) and La Jacquerie (1891-92, unfi nished); a ballet, Namouna, premièred at the Paris Opéra on 6 March 1882, which enchanted the young Debussy and was later revived by Messager; and a pantomime, Néron (1891, lost). But Lalo really began to come into his own as a composer in the 1870s, when there was an important revival of interest in France in instrumental music, to which he contributed many new pieces, as well as unearthing some of his early works, the context now being much more favourable than it had been in the years 1845-1865. Indeed, the Concerts Populaires, which had been initiated by Jules Pasdeloup in 1861, the Société Nationale de Musique (with Lalo as one of its founder-members), which gave its fi rst concert in November 1871, and the Concert National (later to become the Concerts Colonne), launched in 1873, all provided outlets for new compositions at that time – especially symphonic works, but also chamber pieces (which were in the minority, but were certainly not lacking in quality: listen, for instance, to Lalo’s wonderful Trio no. 3 in A minor of 1880). The compositions he had performed there – apart from the Diver- tissement (1872, from Fiesque) and his Symphony in G (1885-1886, a favourite of Sir Thomas Beecham) – were for the most part concertante works, refl ecting his qualities as a polyinstrumental composer and his friendship with famous virtuosos of the time: the Spanish violinist Pablo de Sarasate, the Belgians Martin Marsick (violin) and Adolphe 6 Fischer (cello), and the French pianist Louis Diémer. Lalo’s Violin Sonata in D major, op. 12, started off, in its fi rst version of 1852, as a Grand duo concertant, a title perfectly befi tting a short, three-movement work, with a middle movement consisting of variations, and hardly bearing the features of a grand sonata. In its form it harked back rather to a Classical tradition that was still represented by leading Romantics such as Schubert. At the time of its publication in 1853 it had received no attention at all; but when, some twenty years later, Lalo revised it mini- mally, turning it into a violin sonata, the Société Nationale de Musique was pleased to show its many detractors that the vocation of its members went back further than the French capitulation of 1871. Thus the early trios of César Franck were revived and Lalo was encouraged to take up his old scores. And even though Schumann and Wagner were beginning to be more in accord with current tastes, any touches that happened to recall Schubert or Mendelssohn in those ‘incunabula’ were accepted. The fi rst performance of the Violin Sonata, op. 12, was given at the Société Nationale de Musique on 29 November 1873 by Pablo de Sarasate and Georges Bizet, no less! Its violinistic features give us some idea of Sarasate’s technique and playing style. There is no heaviness, not even in the variations on a rather Schumann-like theme; and the elfi sh vivacity of the fi nal Rondo gives a foretaste of the balletic style of Namouna. This brief, charming, colourful piece, not altogether unlike the early sonatas of Saint-Saëns (which is a compliment, of course!), could not really be described as groundbreaking, but it showed perfectly, fi rst of all, that Lalo’s talent had been underestimated for too long, and secondly, that the genre needed to be cultivated by French musicians – a les- son that was heeded by Gabriel Fauré (a great admirer, incidentally, of Madame Lalo’s beautiful voice), who in 1876 inaugurated the modern French violin sonata with his fi rst composition in the genre. The successes that followed were decisive in securing Lalo’s international reputation. At the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris on 18 January 1874, a matter of weeks after the première of his Violin Sonata, Pablo de Sarasate gave the enthusiastically acclaimed première of his Violin Concerto, op. 20, with Edouard Colonne conducting. The suc- 7 cess of this work – original in its form (in two equal parts, rather than in three move- ments) and striking in its virtuosity and rich orchestration, it was published without delay by Durand – encouraged the composer to begin work immediately, most likely in spring 1874, on another concertante work, the Symphonie espagnole for violin and orchestra, op.