Jean ROGER-DUCASSE (1873-1954)
The Complete Piano Music
Martin Jones (piano)
rec. 2013/2014, Concert Hall of Nimbus Foundation, Wyastone Leys, UK
NIMBUS NI5927 [3 CDs: 185:37]
We know Jean Roger-Ducasse as a somewhat shrouded contemporary of the Debussy-Ravel generation of the 1860s and 70s. Curiously he’s a much more refractive, complex figure than his orchestral works signify – and we get two of those here in reduced form.
Roger-Ducasse’s orchestral music has been held up as the best of him, and he certainly sounds far more advanced here than several of his contemporaries. Think Florent Schmitt in his La Tragédie de Salomé Op 50 of 1907 and you won’t go far wrong. The wild chromatic climaxes and almost barbaric colouring show a composer equal to the elusive, though sometimes overwhelming Schmitt.
The only orchestral music I’ve heard is a second-hand undated Cybella disc (DS 813) acquired in 1992. Featuring the Rhine-Palatinate Philharmonic conducted by Leif Segerstam, it includes the Prelude d’un Ballet (1910) also seen here in a piano transcription, the large scale Orphée (1913), the magnificent Nocturne de Printemps (1915-18), and Suite Française from 1907. Happily, there are two Marco Polo discs (8.223501, 8.223641) that split these pieces and add others including the other entrancing transcription here, Interlude ‘Au Jardin de Marguerite’. I’ve not heard them but intend to.
However, the Piano Music over three CDs played by Martin Jones lays bare this composer’s gifts like an X-ray. The works offer a bare-bones index of his development. Jones takes a gently magisterial path through these shifts and enrichments and proves, as they say, to be the ideal companion.
Roger Ducasse isn’t as easy to place as his chronology suggests. For one thing he’s far more the pupil and disciple of Fauré than contemporary of those composers he was born close to. Nevertheless, he refracted them first, particularly Debussy, then worked through Fauré to sound more modern than any. Both his hesitation – he didn’t start as a composer for solo piano till he was 33 – and absorption are telling. Roger Ducasse’s own complexity as a composer attempted to accommodate the layered clarity of Debussy and the sparkling pointillism of Ravel. Though the span of piano writing is brief – 1906-23, and for the two piano music 1899-1918 – self-discovery is pretty complete by the end, when Roger-Ducasse turned 50.
Disc 1, with the first Barcarole No. 1 from 1906, is a big-boned work, with a fine chordal declamation. It’s shy of proclaiming its essential Fauré-ness perhaps and sounding quite late-Romantic, an impression undercut by impressionism. It’s a strong memorable piece if not the way Roger-Ducasse developed. Melodically, although, it’s characteristic. Melodies in this composer aren’t so much dense as elaborated, arising out of textures like antiphonal bell effects, as also happens here. The Six Preludes of 1907 are though like no-one else’s and precede Debussy’s two sets. The first’s off-kilter melody, its dissonant theme, is entrancing. The second’s more calme et luxe as Duparc or Baudelaire might put it. It’s also like early-to-mid Fauré, till the last downward cascade, gently 20th century. The third’s like Chabrier on holiday. The fourth’s opening is almost atonal then ascends to Ravelian tunefulness. The fifth’s also dissonant in the way Florent Schmitt might recognize, the longest yet at 2’47” capricieux et tender (shouldn’t that be ‘tendre’?) The sixth and last is the longest at three minutes. Again, it starts with its Très souple marking quite dissonant and exploratory yet grows more consonant if only through repetition. Listening through earlier Roger-Ducasse you realize there’s a route not taken, a distinction early on that grows out even more individually. Again, I’m reminded of Schmitt. This last allows rubato and complex rhythms to crown a set of insistent, oblique beauty.
It’s around 1913-14 that Roger-Ducasse became much closer to his old teacher Fauré, having transcribed his Requiem for two pianos. He became intimately acquainted with late Fauré piano
works in all their searching chromaticism as Fauré wrote them. His response, though, was wholly individual.
The brief, really atonal Prelude (1913) Avec beaucoup de fantaisie is a gem of compression almost worthy of late Scriabin from the same year. It sounds like Scriabin, too, with a French accent and a whiff of scent behind the ears. The composer in this sense ranged well beyond his French contemporaries.
The massier Étude in G flat minor (1914) is nearly seven minutes of more consonant material only because it’s being developed rhythmically. It’s less dissonant than the Prelude but here one’s reminded of a near contemporary Frank Bridge in his later piano works – and that goes for the Prelude too. Both melodically and harmonically these composers have much in common in their piano music, though it has to be admitted Bridge was a bolder experimenter, and clearly a major
composer. Here at least Roger-Ducasse ranges beyond Debussy. The fifteen-minute 4 Études (1915) continues this vein, though the pieces form a kind of suite. The first, a Prelude Allegro, spins the same kind of material but ends in a Campanella of sorts, whilst the second is a playful fugue on a child’s game melody ending in a complex fugato pattern. The third Lent is consolatory and attractive, with simple textures; again, it’s nudging the world of Fauré’s Dolly Suite. The fourth, Lentement, is almost twice the preceding piece’s length, just on four minutes. It’s a very different piece, even though it seems to start from simple material. It’s rapidly more complex despite the tempo. One’s reminded of Debussy’s 12 Études from the same year. For a brief moment, that is, till the work turns into a clangourous procession of grief and you realize this has more in common with the spirit if decidedly not the letter of Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin of 1917. Whatever its bland markings,
this is about loss. It simply stops, fading abruptly.
The fifteen-minute Variations sur un Choral (1915) might also be constructed as a kind of memorial. It suddenly quotes Beethoven’s Theme from the Variations in C minor Wo35. It’s a remarkable set of ten variations moving through a mainly total world of brightness to cast shadows, an equivocal Janus-faced comment on war, as it seems.
The substantial Études en Sixtes (1916) over eight minutes caps the preceding Études in length, though its languorous dappled sunlight makes it more like another genre. Certainly Fauré’s
influence striates through this piece strengthening its profile. The long accelerando to the climax though is exciting, including the bell-like cantilation that seems to be this composer’s signature.
Rhythmes (1916) marks a return to exploratory time signatures. It’s also excitingly gathering up everything – late Fauré, Roger-Ducasse’s own dissonant harmonies, and even Debussy’s L’Isle Joyeuse and turning them to a work with wild discontinuities and sudden breaks of a bar’s silence where it plunges back headlong into its own harmonic slipstream. This is the mature voice of a composer fully confident in his own pianistic voice, so much so that he can return to Debussy
and invade him openly like a monarch, as Dryden says of translation. It ends on an exuberant high and one can only speculate what inspired it in the dark of a war.
Disc 2 is the one you’d choose, if forced to. The flowering of the composer’s pianistic imagination, tethered to the reference point of Fauré he chose, not felt he had to adopt, and working through that.
It opens with the swirling atonal Étude in A flat major not far again from the world of Scriabin (1916) developed over nearly ten minutes. It’s true too, as Adrian Farmer points out in his notes, that ten of the twelve Études are in sharps/flats. It’s a liminal world, a cusp that the composer explores, sharp of Fauré as it were.
The first of the Arabesques... (1917) with curious lacunae embedded in both is a rhapsodizing and headlong acceleration; a joyous pilgrimage into futurity taken at speed. Though wayward as arabesques have to be, and in accord with Roger-Ducasse’s own harmonics, this isn’t more arabesque than usual. Harmonically, it’s bright and attractive. The alternating slow-fast-slow-very slow of the 4 Esquisses pour Piano (1917) show more of the way the composer exploited post-Fauréan tonality – unlike the previous dissonances these are more piquant, less wild. Arabesques…. No. 2 (1919) is another bright post-late Fauré work and by this I mean something Fauré himself entered in his Barcarolle No. 13 and his great Nocturne No. 13 in B minor where a bright consolatory sunshine bursts from the gnarly, tunnel-eared harmonies featured in other recent works.
Sonorities (1919) is as it proclaims a rather shimmering piece even more rhapsodic in style, also exploring accelerando and half-lights. Barcarolles No. 2 and No. 3 from 1920 and 1921 are leagues away from the first Barcarolle 14-15 years earlier. Indeed, this quintessential Fauré genre frames Roger-Ducasse’s pianistic career, bar the slightly later Romance of 1923.
Barcarolle No. 2 is a far less stormy piece than the first. Its gently lilting opening certainly enacts something of the pressure of Barcarolle development in Fauré’s hands, over 13 of them. There they evolved from a genre piece, to the portrayal of a boat’s journey, to the shimmering of water itself, then the Charon-like transition from life to death. Roger-Ducasse isn’t as ambitious here except perhaps harmonically, as if picking up the effects of water and developing those.
Barcarolle No. 3 is a more passionate utterance with an even stronger climax. There’s more of an enharmonic slipstream, more of a sense of exploration without tears than the original, and that lends a freedom to Roger-Ducasse’s last piano works. It’s as if he has the blessing to explore the harmonic world of his contemporaries just as they died or stopped writing for piano. That’s clear in the remarkable Impromptu (1921) – Fauré taking his cue from Chopin wrote five of them. It’s simply another vehicle like Arabesque or even Esquisse and Barcarolle for exploration outside the composer’s formal cast of mind. The chiming opening floods into a formal space which melodically
is more wayward, happily searching out the fermata without being entirely certain of arrival.
Chant de l’aube (1921) is another Impromptu perhaps in all but name, with its less assertive frame and flourishing harmonic – even diatonic - colour.
Romance (1923) opens unassumingly but builds to a rocking climax despite its brief compass. It’s both passionate and chromatically striking. It’s a fitting end to the composer’s output, but remarkably clear yet negotiating shadowy harmonic territory. It’s a great pity that just when Roger-Ducasse extended the French pianistic tradition into atonal territory, he bowed out of it. Not as a composer – his 1931 comic opera Cantegril was ahead of him and a few other works, but the piano was one of several genres this fiercely self-critical composer abandoned after 1923. This curiously French rigor – it overwhelmed Duparc, Dukas and Magnard amongst others – crippled many reputations. Disc 3 where Jones is joined by Adrian Farmer (who also supplies the second essay on Roger-Ducasse’s piano music) begins with a Petite Suite paying homage to early Debussy and Massenet at the same time. From 1899, it’s the earliest piece here by seven years and is highly attractive. relatively uncomplicated and quite memorable. Indeed, it’s as if Fauré and Messager got together for a session which is of course what they did in Souvenirs of Bayreuth. The composer here certainly knew it, with its delicious tongue-in-cheek also Janus-faced, looking forward to Les Six.
It’s what happens next that’s more intriguing. Two transcriptions of Roger-Ducasse’s orchestral music the Prelude d’un Ballet from 1910 certainly shimmers with more impressionism than some of his pieces, though is brief at three minutes. The way it opens in a crump of two-piano bass then
fires off wild Debussyian arabesques in the treble is very Schmitt; perhaps this is where we might begin to call it Roger-Ducassian. Then like a true prelude, it just stops. More fascinating still is the eleven-minute Interlude ‘Au Jardin de Marguerite’ (1913) which takes a moment from Faust, a
perhaps menaced repose between storms. It recalls the aesthetics of Mélisande, a heroine of course used by Fauré and Debussy, as well as Sibelius and Schoenberg. Returning to Faust the composer here finds a way of terracing passion and long-reined emotional climaxes with a stunningly memorable palette. The risen theme gleams with genius. You can’t forget it. Think Fauré, the Debussy of Jeux from the same year; and yes, a dash of Schmitt. It’s that kind of feel. This is a work that luckily revels in an orchestral guise too. It’s one of Roger-Ducasse’s great moments; it’d be wonderful to hear either guise in concert.
Through 1916-17 Roger-Ducasse wrote a rather singular set of Études a quatre mains, pour un Commençant in three volumes for five, three and two pieces respectively. That curious inter-skeined sound world here slides under hands and through the way the four interleave in increasingly intriguing patterns. Sometimes they emerge into a singing unanimity. There’s even a sense of that chewy musical identity this composer reveals on attentive listening - and you don’t need to attend, just take your attention off for a moment, come back and be rather surprised. These ten Études
become progressively more complex, more emotionally engaged as they progress. They also become more declamatory. There are several in Livre II – the shimmering VI’s Sans lenteur, the darker VII Lent et triste - which evoke some of the Faustian elements of the Interlude. VIII’s Assez vite et trés rythmé exhibits greater pointillism, something more apparent and more complex as increasing demands are made on executants.
Still it’s in Livre III, we get the apotheosis of this composer’s engagement with two-piano writing. There’s just two pieces, but they’re outstanding: the Adagio classique: Lent with its shimmering cross-rhythms, and the light-infused, sparkling Scherzando: Assez vite. This composer’s still not headlong, even in a Scherzando. It perhaps reflects his complex contrapuntal and harmonic character most. For some reason these weren’t marked IX and X as continuing from the first two books, as if Roger-Ducasse marked a break with the preceding -which begs the question of where Bach and those voices caught in transcription should reside in Roger-Ducasse’s output. Though Bach’s Passacaglia BWV582 is an unexpected conclusion, a transcription from 1918 rounds off the composer’s engagement with four-hand music in a singular equivocation.
And what a transcription it is: sonorous, magnificent, a consolatory monument written whilst Bach’s compatriots were laying waste French soil. It’s also an Escorial to the way this composer imagined things: complex, innovatively conservative, with a sleight of modernity to render him more complex, more veined in modernism than his dusty name lets us imagine. Performances are as you’d expect beyond reproach. Both pianists seem perfectly attuned to Roger-Ducasse’s idiom in the two-piano works. Overall Jones negotiates French clarity too – the proverbial D major of the French language that suffuses French pianism. Jones also understands Roger-Ducasse's refractive even astigmatic gift - that singular way he gropes to modernism via Fauré's late harmonies. Or to adapt poet Emily Dickinson's lines about truth: Roger-Ducasse shows his gifts but shows them slant.
Sadly, administration took over increasingly from 1923, and though Roger-Ducasse finally completed his 1912 String Quartet No, 2 in 1953, and Le petit faune for orchestra from 1950-54, there’s nothing else from his long years of service where he felt increasingly out of synch after his retirement in 1945. It’s a sad end, and explains one reason for his self-inflicted long catafalque of neglect. Had Roger-Ducasse died say in 1923, he might have been taken up earlier. Because he survived his time, there’s an unwarranted stigma. Now we can see his extraordinary, quiet gifts steady and whole.
Simon Jenner
Previous review: Paul Corfield Godfrey (Recording of the Month)
Contents
CD1 [68.36]
Barcarolle (1906) [6.40]
Six Preludes (1907) [10.55]
Prelude (1913) Avec beaucoup de fantaisie [1.10]
Étude in G flat minor (1914) [6.46]
4 Études (1915) [14.39]
Variations sur un Choral (1915) [15.22]
Études en Sixtes (1916) [8.08]
Rhythmes (1916) [4.46]
CD2 [65.10]
Étude in A flat major (1916) [9.32]
Arabesques... (1917) [7.02]
4 Esquisses pour Piano (1917) [7.09]
Arabesques…. No. 2 (1919) [4.25]
Sonorities (1919) [5.58]
Barcarolle No. 2 (1920) [8.56]
Barcarolle No. 3 (1921) [7.40]
Impromptu (1921) [5.03]
Chant de l’aube (1921) [4.25]
Romance (1923) [5.01]
CD3 [51.51]
Petite Suite pour piano a quatre mains (1899) [5.08]
Prélude d’un Ballet (1910) tr. composer [3.01]
Interlude ‘Au Jardin de Marguerite’ (1913) tr. composer [11.06]
Études a quatre mains, pour un Commençant
Livre 1 (5) (1926) [7.08]
Livre iI (3) (1916) [10.51]
Livre III (2) (1917) [6.02]
J. S. Bach Passacaglia BWV582 tr. Roger-Ducasse (1918)
[8.34]
