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Did you know that? I didn't, until I wrote this column.
It was Franz Liszt, composer and pianist (1811-1886), then on the threshold of his solo fame, who in 1840 invented the term "recital" - originally in the plural. With this deliberately rhetorical and poetic neologism, which he conceived with the English musician Frederick Beale and preferred to the expressions "musical soliloquy" or "pianistic monologue", Liszt revolutionized the form of the concert, to the point of becoming one of the first modern showmen (1). In the following century, the advent of recorded music consecrated the discographic form of the recital. This form - which is, after all, nothing more than a program performed by a soloist or, in the case of an opera artist, accompanied by a pianist - has become a must for every performer, a calling card designed to demonstrate virtuosity as well as musical personality, generally through milestones in the repertoire. In recent years, however, we've seen a proliferation of new kinds of programs, favoring escapes into the margins of the repertoire, playing with eras or giving pride of place to the "lesser masters" and other little-known pieces. In writing this, I'm thinking in particular of four (very fine) discs - we'll stick to the pianists here:
The Transcendentalist (2014) by Ivan Ilić:
Vanessa Wagner's aptly named Inland (2019):
Good Night by Bertrand Chamayou :
Labyrinth by David Greilsammer
both published in 2020.
Of course, there has never been a shortage of pioneering performers over the last century, any more than there has been a shortage of thematic programs. But today, it seems to me, these performers are increasingly revealing themselves, through these discs, as music lovers too. A phenomenon that we might be tempted to compare with two others. On the one hand, there's what we might call the "bankruptcy of the repertoire". With the multiplication of references, on vinyl and then on CD, what's the point of recording yet another reading of Chopin's Preludes or Paganini's Caprices, to measure up with more and more generations of giants? Think, for example, of Gabriel Dupont (1878-1914), the composer who beat Maurice Ravel to the Prix de Rome before going on to write several marvellous piano collections, from La Maisons dans les dunes to Heures dolentes: confidential only 15 years ago, his works are now the subject of numerous discographic references...
This (admittedly relative) disaffection has gone hand in hand with the rise of streaming. It could be said - without in any way undermining the greatness of the above-mentioned discographic references - that there is a fine line between the recital and the "compilation". That these heterogeneous - though often thematically homogeneous - collections are another way of existing at a time when music is now listened to in chunks - most often disassociated, by the force of algorithms, from the work (in this case: the album) from which they come.
Insidiously, have we slipped from recital to playlist?
This is by no means to say that such discs are disembodied. Quite the contrary, in fact. Just as the playlist seems to me to be the most democratic way of proposing and sharing a musical "vision", they seem to constitute a new way of reaffirming the primacy of the performer. First and foremost as a "curator": these recital-albums are in fact veritable sound architectures, constructed by a musician who is no longer merely a virtuoso, but also a dramatist. The true alpha and omega of Web 2.0, "curation" - the act of making a selection from the infinite content available - is today a genuine way of asserting one's personality as a music lover, while revealing little-known works, as well as one's subjectivity as an amateur and one's psyche as a performer.
"I was fifteen, I think. It was a calm, serene spring night, with a few nocturnal birdsongs in the distance. The strange barking of a dog, perhaps lost, sounded like a startling call, a mysterious premonition. I wanted to express this dream by looking for musical pieces. Each one expresses an emotion, a question, a doubt, a fear or a desire; all the moments that have marked this very long journey leading to this program, this labyrinth." David Greilsammer 's words to Radio Classique speak volumes about the intimacy involved in such projects. Now freed from the pressure to perform iconic works of the repertoire (even if they excel at doing so), these 2.0 musicians do full justice to the notion of "interpreter-creator", so much so that they contribute, by rearranging it, to making the music they serve heard differently, thanks to a sensibility that plays with eras and borders - areas and eras.
To go beyond the field of solo pianists, I'm thinking in writing this of the approach taken by an ensemble such as La Tempête, notably on its Azahar disc (2017): interweaving pieces of medieval music with modern scores by Maurice Ohana (1913-1992) and Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971), this disc truly revealed the latter's marvellous Requiem to me; perhaps precisely because they were "salced" between works by Guillaume de Machaut (1300-1377), its successive movements seemed to me to resonate all the more forcefully, following a fuller perspective, more salient reliefs...
And to go beyond the "discographic" field, I'll conclude by recalling the]h[iatus trio concert I attended at the Sonorités festival in Montpellier in 2007. Works of contemporary music - James Tenney, Helmuth Lachenmann, Salvatore Sciarrino... - were performed, but no longer in the classical form of the "recital", i.e. interspersed with the ritual applause that often only serves to break the spell. On the contrary, they were interlinked, linked by improvisations that allowed us to move from one to the next, thanks to performers who had literally become passers-by. Thus, in the field of Western music with a written tradition, there are today certain discs which, like certain concerts, have attained the status of autonomous works.
David Sanson
