Emili Brugalla - Emili Brugalla & Vesko Stambolov Piano Duo (Piano Duo Version) (2021)

Also intended for rehearsals with the dancers, the arrangement of the Rite of Spring by Stravinsky himself was performed, before the tumultuous Parisian creation of the ballet on May 29, 1913, in its version for four hands at the salon of Winnaretta Singer, Princess of Polignac. The composer was accompanied by Claude Debussy! In the biography he devotes to Stravinsky (Paris, Fayard, 1982, p. 86), André Boucourechliev recounts that the manuscript of this reduction, offered by its creator to the French pianist of Russian origin Misia Sert, who died in 1950, was offered in auction in London in 1967 and that it was Stravinsky who bought it. The virtuosos did not hesitate to interpret this monument in the history of music; the pairs Ashkenazy-Gavrilov (Decca), Achatz-Pöntinen (BIS), Ivaldi-Lee (Arion), the duo Koroliov (Tacet) and a few others seized it, not to mention our compatriots Sylvia Traey and René Groslot (EMI) . This is to say if the discography is diverse. Others have opted for the two-piano formula, thereby increasing opulence; this is the case with Argerich-Barenboim or the Labèque sisters, each time for DG. Fazil Say, for his part, chose to burn the work at Teldec using the re-recording system. A few years ago, a Mirare recording, made in November 2007, featured the four-handed version of sisters Lidija and Sanja Bizjak, of wild youthfulness, for which we have a preference. Today, Spanish label Columna Música, based in Sabadell, is releasing a new print by the duo Brugalla-Stambolov. They both teach chamber music and piano at the Liceu Conservatory in Barcelona.

Emili Brugalla trained at the same Catalan Conservatory, before studying with Eulàlia Solé and improving his skills with Bruno Canino or Maria Curcio. A founding member of the Kandinsky Trio, he often performs as a soloist. He has to his credit recordings of Catalan music from the twentieth century, as well as pages by Granados, Mompou, Serra or Brahms. For his part, Vesko Stambolov received his musical education in his native Bulgaria, where he had as teachers Maria Gineva, Dimo ​​Dimov and Krasimir Taskov. His very eclectic repertoire consists of around forty piano concertos, from Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach to Górecki, not to mention the Bulgarian composers he defends (Vladigerov, Goleminov, Pipkov ...), but also of pages of Bach to which he dedicates frequent recitals. We can find his prints under the German label Meta Records, or at Nimbus. The version of the Rite of Spring that the Brugalla-Stambolov duo offers was engraved in January 2020 in the concert hall of the Pancho Vladigerov National Academy of Music in Sofia. If Stravinsky's four-handed arrangement does not quite do justice to the splendours of the orchestral version, we find there, as the note rightly says, the great Russian tradition, from the magical writing of Glinka and the fantasies of Dargomyjsky up to the colors of Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. We find here the choreographic aspects through the jerky rhythms, the sonic asperities, the explosiveness of the nuances and the emotional sensations that we experience thanks to the alchemy of the sounds that the composer distils throughout a haunting musical discourse. and percussive. In The Adoration of the Earth, the duo prepares with ample and subtle dynamics and progressive intensity the Spring Rounds and the Games of the Rival Cities, the vehemence of which they translate with marked effects of stamps. La Danse de la terre concludes this first part in the popular spirit that suits it. The announcement of the Sacrifice includes the part of mystery which will prepare the power of the Glorification of the chosen one and the orgiastic character of the Sacral Dance. Within this pagan ritual as fiery and disproportionate as it is bubbling and corrosive, we find the rise to violence translated with ardor and fire, even if one or the other drop in tension appears and encourages us to keep our preference for engravings from the 21st century to the dazzling Bizjak sisters.

The latter had opted for a uniformly Stravinsky program, adding to the Coronation a very playful version of Petrouchka and Easy Pieces. Here, the complement consists of an arrangement for two pianos of a choice made by Mikhail Pletnev of nine numbers of Prokofiev's Cinderella. Pletnev himself brilliantly recorded this compilation with Martha Argerich for DG. We find there the essential scenes of the ballet, nine pieces selected from the small fifty of the score: Introduction - Quarrel - Winter - Spring - Waltz of Cendrillon - Gavotte - Gallop - Slow waltz - Finale. Even if the dynamic palette is preserved and the timbres well diversified by Brugalla-Stambolov, they cannot compete with the brilliance and the transparency, in particular in the waltzes, nor with the magical sound fantasy that the incomparable duo Argerich- infused into them. Pletnev.