Horvath Begins Project to Record Tailleferre

This month pianist Nicolas Horvath launched his latest multi-release project with the Grand Piano label. I first became aware of him through his earlier project to record the music of Philip Glass. Unless I am mistaken, that project was launched in 2015 and seems to have concluded at the end of 2019 with the release of its sixth volume, which was given the title America. This was followed by a four-volume project of the complete piano works of Erik Satie. More recently, however, I was drawn to “singles” releases devoted to Alvin Lucier and the “unknown” music of Claude Debussy.

Germaine Tailleferre of the cover of Nicolas Horvath’s first album of her music (courtesy of Naxos of America)

The new project has been planned as a three-volume set of the complete piano music composed by Germaine Tailleferre entitled Her Piano Works, Revived. The first of those volumes is now available through an Amazon.com Web page. Tailleferre was the only member of Les Six, whose other members were Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthurs Honegger, Darius Milhaud, and Francis Poulenc. This was a somewhat arbitrary “gathering of minds” that seems to have originated when the music critic Henri Collet decided to get even with Mily Balakirev leading a group of five Russian composers (sometimes known as the Mighty Handful), the other members being César Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Alexander Borodin.

In my own studies of music, I went through a generous number of decades during which all I knew about Tailleferre was her name. Unless I am mistaken, my “first contact” occurred during one of Sarah Cahill’s The Future is Female recitals, which took place in the Old First Concerts series in June of 2020. (I am almost certain that Tailleferre first entered Cahill’s ranks much earlier, but this was the first time I was able to listen to Cahill perform her music.) About six months later Samantha Cho included four short Tailleferre compositions in her Old First Concerts recital in January of 2021.

Cho’s recital was my first encounter with Tailleferre as a miniaturist. That side of her work dominates the content of Horvath’s first volume, which contains over 80 minutes of music. Over the course of the album’s 55(!) tracks, only one exceeds the quarter-hour mark. This is the world premiere recording of “Sous le rempart d’Athènes” (which was originally composed as incidental music for orchestra); and its duration is a bit of a shock after the haiku-like brevity of the preceding 33 tracks.

Much of the new release is occupied by 24 tracks collected under the title Petites Ouvertures d’Airs Anciens. All of these selections are based on early music sources from France and Italy that were notated only as figured bass. The only composer identified explicitly by name is Jean-Baptiste Lully. However, other sources include Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, Claudio Monteverdi, and Alessandro Scarlatti. Since the Monteverdi excerpt is an aria from Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria, it may ring familiar to opera lovers or those particularly interested in Monteverdi’s music.

Clearly, however, one is not expected to “sit still and listen” to the entire sequence of 55 tracks. The album is an invitation to explore. That invitation is well worth accepting!