Emmanuel Despax’s boyhood was spent discussing music and poetry with his poet grandfather, Jacques Charpentreau, over French patisseries. Memories of those perfect moments spent with his beloved relative, listening to Debussy, Poulenc, Ravel, Saint Saëns, has led to Despax’s latest piano release, Après un rêve.

Some works are daringly familiar. Debussy’s Clair de Lune, for instance, is transformed by Despax’s touch – neither is it too vigorous or too light. In Despax’s hands, Clair de Lune gains substance and meaning. 

We are also treated to virtually unknown works such as Francis Poulenc’s Les Soirées de Nazelles, written between 1930-1936, when Poulenc mooched around his country residence on summer evenings, a little restless and hankering after Paris. The pieces have that yearning romantic quality as heard on track 4, Le Coeur sur la main (Heart on one’s sleeve). La Suite dans les idées ( The suite of ideas) and Le gout du malheur (The taste of sadness) are meanwhile highly original and full of contrasting emotions and colour. 

In  Danse Macabre, Op 40 by Saint-Saëns, Despax changes tack. With an arrangement by Horowitz, he delivers a virtuosic, seemingly effortless, electrifying performance,

Maurice Ravel’s Le Gibet  (The Gallows) is a strange, haunting, slow-burn piece with an insistent tone – the toll of a funereal bell.

I hadn’t heard Henri Duparc’s Aux Etoiles, a quiet, expansive good-feel work, to be listened to on a balmy summer’s evening like tonight at my time of writing.

When you are replete with music – Francophiles might want to run their eyes through the poems included by Despax in the notes. You have Baudelaire, Musset, Verlaine, and of course poems by Jacques Charpentreau, his beloved grandfather.

A quality recording of known and less well-known French repertoire – and one which shows that Despax has Belle Epoque repertoire in his bones.

KH

Emmanuel Despax’s Après un Rêve: Belle Epoque: Nights at the Piano is out now on Signum Classics