Charles Owen - Poulenc: Piano Music (2014)

Charles Owen, Piano. This is Charles Owen’s second disc in the “New Horizons” series (see SOMMCD 028). After Debussy and Ravel, and before Messiaen, Poulenc’s is the most significant body of French solo piano music of the twentieth-century. He combined the Dadaesque qualities of Erik Satie with the deeper, more serious expression of his composition teacher, Charles Koechlin, alongside his own formidable performing mastery as a pianist. Charles Owen’s own words — “One of the great joys in playing this repertoire is the need to recapture the joie de vivre inherent in the music’s conception.”