Bertrand Chamayou Liszt – Schumann – Ravel – Balakirev – Glinka

It's an understatement to say that virtuosity, without of course excluding moments of pure poetry, is the order of the day in this recital. Pianist Bertrand Chamayou tackles nothing less than the most transcendent pages of the repertoire, on an odyssey to the very end of the piano. A new gift to the Opéra public from an exceptional artist.

It was in 1866 that Liszt published his two Franciscan Legends, the second of which, dedicated to his patron Saint-François de Paule, offers a pianistic tableau of the stormy sea. Fantastic swells and gusts collide with the chorale symbolising the imperturbable march of the saint, whose spirituality triumphs over chaos. Schumann's Fantasy Op. 17 is at times erratic and whimsical, and in the coda of its second movement contains one of the most formidable passages in Romantic piano music. It contains all the "moods" of a composer who despaired of seeing his love for Clara blossom. Even more formidable is the hallucinatory world of Gaspard de la nuit, in which Ravel concentrates the unbridled, morbid imagination of Aloysius Bertrand: the undulating Ondine and the gloomy death knell of the Gibet are followed by the sarcastic leaps of the gnome Scarbo, in an unequalled summit of virtuosity. However, Balakirev thought he had reached his technical limits not in the beautiful pieces in which he pays homage to Chopin, but in Islamey (1870), a mythical score in which the frenetic dances of the Caucasus explode in a whirlwind of rhythms, formulas and sonorities, before a thunder of octaves chants out the concluding furia.