Those that have been reading this site for some time probably know by now that I have done my best to follow the recording activities of pianist Nicolas Horvath. That interest dates back to my following his Glassworlds project, a series of six CDs surveying the solo piano music of Philip Glass, which was completed in September of 2019. That series was followed by two single-CD releases in 2021 devoted to Alvin Lucier and rare piano music by Claude Debussy, followed, in April of 2022, by the beginning of a three-volume account of the complete piano music composed by Germaine Tailleferre.
However, a week ago I learned that Horvath had initiated another project at the end of 2021. This involved an account of the complete piano works of Jean Catoire. When the project was completed this past July, it consisted of 31 hours of music that had been divided into eight volumes, most of which ran shy of four hours distributed across multiple CDs. Over the last couple of days, I experienced the first volume in this collection, which, given the scale of its content, is currently available from Amazon.com only through a Web page for MP3 download.
Given the scale of this content, it is more than a little unfortunate that the Wikipedia page for Catoire is currently labeled as a “stub,” whose content is practically microscopic. Basically, it consists of one sentence and one paragraph as follows:
Jean Catoire (1 April 1923 – 9 November 2005) was a French composer of contemporary classical music.
He studied with Olivier Messiaen and developed a personal style that was spiritual in outlook; in this regard his output is comparable to that of the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. He was prolific, producing 604 opus numbers by 1996. The first recording of his music was released in 1999.
To put those catalog numbers in context, the earliest solo piano composition is Opus 134, and the latest is Opus 520.
The Wikipedia page also includes a hyperlink to a much more informative essay written by James D’Angelo on July 30, 1996. D’Angelo is cited as one of the sources for the booklet essay that accompanies Horvath’s recordings. The author of that essay is Lawrence Ball, who cites Catoire himself as another source, along with contributions from Catherine Catoire (the composer’s second wife) and Christine Turellier. While none of these sources accounts for Opus 1 in terms of either date or genre, one can deduce from the available data that Catoire had begun composing seriously around 1940; and by 1950 he had composed eight symphonies.
In that context the following excerpt from D’Angelo’s essay is particularly informative:
The evolution of his music was so rapid that he anticipated the now famous American minimalist composers LaMonte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Phillip Glass who first gained attention in the late 1960s. However, Catoire's style in its continuous static slowness and quietude cannot be truly compared with the pulsating rhythmic styles of these composers. Rather Catoire precursors such composers as Henryk Gorecki, John Tavener and most especially Arvo Pärt who often write sacred works in an archaic yet modern style and have been referred to as the 'sacred or holy minimalists.' In this sense the Catoire music echos the sacred compositions of the medieval Notre Dame school of Perotin and Leonin and, in relation to its unusual chromaticism, the works of Gesualdo.
Where the piano music is concerned, I am not sure that I would agree with any of the composers cited in that passage, the most viable exception being Young. Rather, I would say that the prevailing rhetoric across the five compositions I encountered in the first volume of Horvath’s collection is one of quietude and stillness. My own approach to listening tends to favor the horizontal to the vertical. More specifically, I was less interested in the content of chords and whether that content was consonant or dissonant and more interested in how the music was the result of “building blocks,” all of which involved stepwise movement. The blocks could be of different sizes; but, more often than not, the stepwise movement tended to involve only two notes. If the music “progressed,” then it did so through the interplay of rising and falling stepwise passages.
The first volume of Horvath’s release also makes it clear that Catoire could work with a significantly wide distribution of durational scales. Thus, the shortest composition in the album is Opus 145, whose duration is basically one minute and 45 seconds. (Was the work inspired by the opus number?) On the other hand, the duration of Opus 157 is somewhat over 90 minutes, meaning that the entire composition cannot fit on a single CD.
The good news is that listening to this particular composition is not problematic if one downloads the MP3 track. However, the bad news is that all that valuable booklet content is not available through the Amazon Web page! On the other hand it might be fair to say that this is music that invites (if not obliges) the listener to do little more than just pay attention and then find his/her/their own way as the music progresses. From a personal point of view, I would say that listening to this first volume has whetted my appetite for taking on the second.
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