Maurice Emmanuel
Piano Sonatinas 1-6
Patrick Hemmerlé Piano
Melism MLS-CD-018
Full price
The Review
Many of the composers who spanned the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries experimented with escaping the then traditional boundaries of key signatures. Some, like the Second Viennese School, abandoned them altogether in favour of twelve tone sequences.
Others looked to the past – folk music or the music that they associated with the ancient exotic cultures of Greece and Egypt. Maurice Emmanuel (1862-1938) was fascinated with such modal forms.
Nonetheless, his music does not seem too far removed from the music that other French composers were writing at the time. It was sufficiently unusual, though, that his teacher, Leo Delibes, had him thrown out of the Paris Conservatoire (what an obnoxious creep Delibes must have been in his fifties – he died at only 54 – despite his nice ballets and that BA Flower Duet). Emmanuel eventually returned to the Conservatoire, but to teach musicology, not to be looked to as an accomplished composer.
The first sonatina, Bourgignonne, dates from 1893, two years after Delibes’ death, and remained unpublished until Emmanuel was in his sixties. The feel of the music is not as immediate as his near contemporary Ravel but from our distance it is not mystifying or difficult either, especially since we know he was writing at the same time as Scriabin and Bartok. The second sonatina explores the birds, the quail and the nightingale before quoting the cuckoo from Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, but not with the forensic attention to realistic avian calls that his pupil Messiaen brought to the material.
Like the works to come, the compositional complexities and the pianistic demands are not daunting to the listener, though I suspect that is mainly due to the skill of the interpreter here. The last of the six Sonatinas was written in 1926 and the language by then has become more dense, as one would expect from its date, but no less articulate.
Hemmerlé is highly persuasive and he has clearly taken this music to his heart. His booklet notes are essential reading too, though I wish the people in the photographs were identified. Emmanuel’s music is so little played that it is hard to offer any comparisons, though there are a good number of pianists I would like to hear tackling it. For the moment Hemmerlé and the Melism label must be seriously congratulated for making these imaginative works from the golden age of French pianism available.
SM