Exactly one week ago, I began writing about the French composer Jean Catoire (April 1, 1923–November 9, 2005) and Nicolas Horvath’s project to record Catoire’s complete piano works. After establishing what I hoped would be a suitable background for the interested listener, I turned my attention to the first of the eight volumes that Catoire had compiled. This morning I finished listening to the three CDs that constitute the second volume, again available from Amazon.com only through a Web page for MP3 download.. As might be imagined, one of my primary concerns was whether or not this would be a more-of-the-same listening experience.
It would appear that Lawrence Ball, who wrote the essay for the accompanying booklet of the entire collection, anticipated my concern. As a result, the booklet includes reproductions of manuscript pages for Opus 134, the composition at the very beginning of the first volume, and Opus 162, the first composition in the second volume. The result is that the eye may be more likely to see the features that matter than would the ear that is encountering these pieces for the first time.
What is most evident to the eye is that the texture of Opus 162 is much thicker than that of Opus 134. Both pieces are structured around stepwise movement, primarily in the form of couplets. However, Opus 134 is basically a two-voice composition with one voice sounding a pair of those couplets against a single sustained tone in the other voice. Over the course of the piece, the right and left hands exchange their “assigned duties” until the final two measures, which serve as a coda. (There are two versions of that coda, and Horvath recorded the second of them.)
In Opus 162 both hands are executing the stepwise couplets. While most of those couplets involve quarter notes, Catoire thickens the texture by adding couplets of half notes. At the very bottom of the first page, we see that he has introduced two measures in which two “voices” sound those couplets in syncopation to the half-note couplets. It is also worth noting that familiarity with Opus 162 by virtue of the manuscript page will probably serve to guide the ear through Opus 163, which introduces both rests and new approaches to the “distribution of labor” across the contributing voices.
It may also be worth noting that, unlike the compositions in the first volume, all of the pieces in the second have overall durations of either a quarter of an hour or a half of an hour (roughly so in both cases). As a result, Opus 163 is about twice as long as Opus 162 and about the same duration as Opus 164. The second CD in the second volume consists of four compositions (Opera 204–207), all in that quarter-hour duration. The final CD consists of Opus 210 and Opus 211, both of which are on the half-hour scale. (To be fair, none of this emerged through listening, determined, instead, by examining the tracks with Apple Music!)
All of this adds up to the fact that, where my own listening habits are concerned, the second volume was as engaging as the first, leaving me curious about what I shall encounter when I move on to the third volume!
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