Claire-Marie Le Guay STRAVINSKY Petrouchka RAVEL Daphnis et Chloé

This disc is advertised as ‘transcriptions pour piano par les auteurs’. Question: what is the difference between a transcription, an arrangement, a reduction and a concert version? Answer: it seems to be a grey area. And in this case the greyness could easily mislead buyers into thinking they are getting something that they are not. 

Stravinsky made the rationale behind the Trois mouvements for piano as clear as could be: ‘I tried to make of this Petrushka an essentially pianistic work using the resources of that instrument and without assigning it in any way a role as imitator’ (a lecture in 1935). Even though the piano was already integral to the work’s original conception, Stravinsky was careful to choose those parts of the ballet that would come off in the solo piano medium, and then felt free to play around with the text.

Ravel’s piano score of Daphnis, variously described here as a ‘transcription’ and a ‘version de concert’, is in fact, as I understand these terms, neither. Nor is it the version referred to in the booklet as the piano score completed on May 1, 1910, since this did not include the definitive ending, which is played here. What Claire-Marie le Guay does play – and with at times breathtaking virtuosity – is no more than the piano score prepared by Ravel for the use of the choreographer Fokine during the 1912 rehearsals. In my view it is a piano reduction, with most of what that word implies. Not to beat about the bush, the atmospheric moments in the score simply don’t work, and the slow chords of the choral link into the Dawn Scene, frankly, sound silly. I was interested to see Bryce Morrison (11/03) confronting a similar problem in Biret’s recording of the Firebird piano score – and also coming up against the arrangement/transcription question. 

I first came across le Guay playing the Dutilleux Sonata, in a performance I admire very much (as, rather more importantly, does the composer). She throws off the Petrushka pieces with enormous élan and does her considerable best at every point in the Ravel. But I’m afraid the latter brought to mind images of women preachers and dogs walking on their hind legs. In the enthusiasm to find ‘new’ pieces by the great composers this is, in my view, a ballet too far. (Gramophone)

François Salque / Claire-Marie Le Guay SCHUBERT Wanderer

Is it the lure of the unknown or the need to run away from something that prompts the Romantic ‘Wanderer’ to roam the world without any precise aim? If ever he encounters happiness where he is, his solitary itinerary nevertheless retains an initiatory quality. The lieder of Franz Schubert, here transcribed for cello and piano, explore all the nuances of this inner quest, in which a journey both painful and comforting finally leads to tranquillity and a sort of transcendence.

In November 1824 Franz Schubert composed a sonata in A minor (D821) specifically intended for performance on the arpeggione, a stringed instrument that enjoyed no more than an ephemeral existence. Patented in 1823 by Johann Georg Stauffer (1778–1853), one of the most important Viennese luthiers of the early nineteenth century, the arpeggione (also known as ‘guitarre d’amour’ at the time) offered a compromise between the guitar and the cello. While retaining several features of the guitar – the six strings and their tuning, the neck with its twenty-two frets for positioning the fingers and the smoothly contoured body – it was played like the cello, between the knees, with the vibration of the strings produced by a bow. Today there are no more than a dozen arpeggiones in the world (either originals or copies); the timbre of these instruments was very close to that of the nineteenth-century cello and to the viola, less rounded and warm than the modern cello, but richer in upper harmonics.

Claire-Marie Le Guay BACH

Claire-Marie Le Guay is established as a major international soloist. She recently performed in venues like Suntory Hall in Tokyo, Atheneum in Bucarest, Avery Fisher Hall in New York’s Lincoln Center for the Mostly Mozart Festival, toured with Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Civic Orchestra in the United-States, the Tonhalle in Zurich, the Montreux Festival, Luxemburg’s Philharmonie and major festivals including La Roque d’Anthéron, la Folle Journée, Klavier festival Rühr, Festival Enescu..

Claire-Marie  has performed as a soloist with a great number of major orchestras throughout the world such as the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the New Japan Philharmonic, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte Carlo, the Bayerische Rundfunk Orchester, the Orchestre de Paris, the Orchestre National de Lyon, The Orchestre Philharmonqiue du Luxembourg, the Residentie Orkest in the Hague, the Rheinland-Pfalz Philharmonie, the Kölner Kammerorchester, the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne,  the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Liège, the Sao Paulo State Symphony, with conductors like Daniel Barenboim, Louis Langrée, Gerd Albrecht, Emmanuel Krivine, Yuri Temirkano. 

In 2013 and 2014, concerts at the Mozarteum in Salzburg with Louis Langrée and the Salzburg Camerata for the Mozartwoche, at the Enescu Festival in Bucarest, the Schwetzingen Festival, the Festival International de la Roque d’Anthéron, La Folle Journée, Opéra de Dijon, Salle Gaveau in Paris, Freiburg Konzerthaus, etc.

Intended to ‘instruct us and elevate our souls’, the œuvre for keyboard of Bach allows us to travel to concertante Italy and invites us to dance or improvisation. From the moving 'Capriccio on the Departure of a Beloved Brother' to the 'Italian Concerto' by way of 'Partita no.1', the pianist Claire-Marie Le Guay offers a portrait of Bach that reveals the multiple facets of his genius: the virtuoso improviser, the pedagogue, the builder of cathedrals in sound.