Music from Proust's Salons

 Steven Isserlis/Connie Shih, Music from Proust's Salons (BIS)

Steven Isserlis is among the top few of my favourite musicians in a very competitive field. Proust's A la Recherche, it was decided here last year, is the greatest novel. So the equation meant that it didn't take much to sell this disc to me.

From the title I misled myself to expect music a bit lightweight or even Palm Court but those fin de siecle salons attracted the top talents and not much of this is lounge music.

It most appropriately begins with Proust's very close associate, Reynaldo Hahn and his gorgeous Variations chantantes sur un air ancien which is only 4'54 but the very highlight of the album. Try it here,

 Sonorous and resonant, it would have been more 'retro' then than it sounds now as with Hahn's utterly blissful baroque pastiche in the song A Chloris. This is an album of music for cello and piano and throughout it Connie Shih is worth her equal billing with Isserlis, here in restrained dialogue until the moving ending. The trilling of notes in the cello part is subtly done and not decorous. It's a wonderful way to start, relatively uncomplicated, before the bigger pieces to come. It set me off in search of more Hahn, of which there's not that much readily available, but we will see. Any more like this would be essential.

Gabriel Faure's Romance and Elegie have more demonstrative moments. Proust was a big fan, as Steven's cheerful sleevenotes tell us. For me, he is at least up there with Ravel and Debussy if not ahead of them on account of the dreamy Requiem but they had more demanding aspects to them as well and we are being softened up a bit for the first of the two major works on the disc, the Cello Sonata no.1 by Saint-Saens who in at least some small way provided the model for the composer, Vinteuil, in A la Recherche. As in the Cesar Franck which is to come, the piece gives Connie plenty of opportunities to demonstrate dextrous and expansive playing when not providing the support role. What one gets from both musicians in this music is a sense of 'flow' which, having looked at two Bach Suites played by Steven on You Tube recently, where he seemed to me to be breaking it more into distinct phrases, is very much what all of this repertoire demands. There's also the original finale to the Sonata included for anybody who feels like deciding if an artist's later improvements are worthwhile. Camille presumably thought so but up to a point a professional artist does what they have to do to please their patrons.

Henri Duparc and Augusta Holmes were students of Franck and provide a lead in to the 28'22 of his Sonata in A major that Steven reports comes from the later period of Franck's career in which he became more exaggeratedly Romantic on account of an infatuation, or whatever it was, and where would art be without those. I only just finished Humphrey Carpenter's biography of Benjamin Britten this morning and so I feel more qualified to comment on that than I do on Cesar Franck, Proust's favourite composer next to Beethoven. But he reaches exuberant, or disturbed, heights in a piece with only two instruments that adds plenty to my idea that less is more and somehow smaller forces can seem to generate more than a whole orchestra which I first thought in the 1970's with my cassette of Pictures at an Exhibition with solo piano on one side and Ravel's orchestration on the other. I much preferred it unorchestrated.

Franck's Sonata becomes torrential. It is a hugely satisfying album with music by composers I wouldn't naturally go in search of and that is the value of artists like Isserlis. Already on order is his forthcoming book on the Bach Suites. Already on the shelves are gamba sonatas from the baroque, his recent Tavener album and bits in between. I've seen him playing the Haydn and Shostakovich concertos amongst others and his favourite composer is Schumann. So, as well as being apparently the kindliest bloke in the world, happy to stop and sign my programme when he had to find his way into Portsmouth Guildhall via the bar once because he couldn't find his way in through the back door, he's exactly the advocate music needs, at home in any period. Not that any evangelistic advocacy is really the motive. He quite clearly does it mainly because he believes in it and wants to. O, yes, and because he's fantastically good at it.