Alexander Paley - Rameau: Suite en Mi & Suite en Ré (2015) [Hi-Res]

My first encounter with Rameau came when I was seven years old. The piano was predominant in musical life in the Soviet Union at the time but Johann Sebastian Bach was the only composer to represent the baroque era. Ever-present in concert halls, his compositions were also the daily bread of young pianists in music school. My first teacher had been born in Paris and had a deep knowledge and strong sense of French culture, especially French literature. Thanks to him, I in turn fell in love with France in general and Rameau in particular, and Rameau has stayed with me ever since. I have always kept him in a corner of my mind without ever being able to play his music in public, because unfortunately concert organisers, including in France, then as now prefer composers better known to the general public.

The harpsichord was a rarity, to say the least, in the Russia of my childhood. It had been introduced by Wanda Landowska, who played for Leon Tolstoy at his house in Yasnaya Polyana in 1907 and 1909, but nothing ever really came of her visit. Landowska’s instrument was very different from those in use nowadays, of course, but ultimately that has no real significance. A harpsichordist is not a pianist; two different skill sets are involved. Although I could play a harpsichord – it is a keyboard instrument after all – I could not claim to really understand the instrument. So I approach Rameau’s music unequivocally as a pianist. I am not the first, far from it in fact, to argue that the sound qualities of Rameau’s music lend themselves entirely to performance on the piano.

There is no question here of merely imitating the harpsichord. It seems a great shame not to make full use of the possibilities our modern piano has to offer, as Glenn Gould – a musician I admire unreservedly – did with Bach. In particular, I use the pedal not to achieve greater legato but to add a wider range of colours to my interpretation, always provided of course that those colours are compatible with Rameau. And colour has always been crucially important in French music. I have also been particularly attentive to tempo. Rameau himself said that the tempo should never be too fast, and in fact his markings are very precise. Pushkin wrote that “serving the lyre rules out vanity”. Tempo must not be a matter of vanity; it must be the speed of execution which allows the performer to articulate everything contained in the music. When Rameau writes “fast”, “very fast” or even “faster”, he means that each ornament must still be clearly articulated, and his ornaments are very difficult to execute.

On the question of ornaments, for which the composer left a very full table, I concur with the great Wanda Landowska when she said that during the baroque era, any musician incapable of ornamenting or improvising was considered illiterate. A repeat, for example, needed ornamentation; it was like another aspect of the same piece. As I see it, ornamentation is like a vast field into which the performer can introduce the material that existed around Rameau in his own day. In La Vénitienne (First Book, 1706), for example, after playing exactly what Rameau wrote, I have inserted quotations from Domenico Scarlatti and Padre Martini (his famous Plaisir d’amour). That is also why I have introduced the Dies iræ into the variations of the famous Gavotte. I am profoundly convinced that I am entitled to do so. I have tried to play each phrase, each note penned by Rameau because the text remains the bible and must be scrupulously respected. But Debussy said that music happened between the notes and it is up the performer to discover what exists in the realm beyond paper and ink. What I play has nothing whatsoever to do with transcription as practised so superbly by Godowski. Nor is it an attempt to transform the music into something a hypothetical contemporary audience can listen to. I simply try to share the immense beauty that comes into being as I sit and play and the listener sits and listens.

Alexander Paley, piano