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Mozart - Prokofiev
CD1 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 1756-1791
CD2 Sergey Prokofiev 1891-1953
DVD bonus
Lise de la Salle piano " Close your eyes and try to imagine a succession of tableaux..." By Lise de la Salle " Close your eyes and try to imagine a succession of tableaux... First of all, three very different Mozartian worlds. A profound Mozart, sad and resigned, against a dark, heavy sky, in the rondo: a work from the end of his life, announcing Schumann or Schubert, a radical change from the classical form to which Mozart has accustomed us. Then make room for a more cheerful scene with the sonata, written by a nineteen-year-old Mozart, impulsive and brimming with hope. Here, the main challenge to the performer is to achieve a coherent evolution in these three movements, when the finale is astonishingly long in relation to the overall structure of the sonata itself; it is imperative not to lose the listener's attention! The variations on the well-known theme 'Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman', written on commission, show us a Mozart full of wit and humour: a real little gem, too often unfairly denigrated. Imagine a series of vignettes featuring a young girl: now mocking, now laughing, now sorrowful. Mozart multiplies the use of compositional devices, with rhythmic delays and harmonic shifts, while conserving a breathtaking simplicity of style. He is enjoying himself, delighting in his skill. Now imagine three utterly dissimilar worlds, created by Sergey Prokofiev. A youthful work influenced by the industrial era, by its implacably harsh, pitiless mentality: the Toccata. Close your eyes and imagine armoured tanks crushing everything in their path, an inflexible power and strength wholly devoid of humanity. In the second part of this work, Prokofiev adds sudden smacks, little slaps, ending on an explosion. The essential difficult for the pianist confronted with this technically daunting piece is to play it in the image of the work itself, that is to say quite unwaveringly, thus becoming in his or her turn an implacable performer. In Sonata no.3, on the other hand, you may imagine folksongs resounding in the Russian countryside, a lively, rhythmic ballad; then a flawless blue horizon stretching as far as the eye can see in the Moderato. A bare steppe landscape under a pure sky, sometimes a few wisps of fog, a wintry atmosphere. Finally, plunge into the universe of the ballet with the six excerpts from Romeo and Juliet (selected from the complete set of ten in order to keep to the logic of the concert hall which is so important to me), imagining Rudolf Nureyev's famous choreography under this music. Behind a certain tension and an almost destructive willpower, an animality ('Montagues and Capulets'), sense the power of human feelings of love ('Romeo bids Juliet farewell'). Here is the ideal illustration of a musical voyage in which we can find the soul of the story note for note in the music. Mozart and Prokofiev composed these piano works with a fascinating clarity and precision which never excludes lyricism. Their extremely classical style, with its limpid melodic line, evolves from bar to bar; a great lyrical impulse, a broad phrase in which the music takes on a more carnal aspect, then we return to the initial precision. These are two very special and touching musical voyages." Lise de la Salle
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