CHRYSTEL MARCHAND (b.1958): Piano Sonatas No. 1 "in memoriam Nadia Boulanger" and No. 2 "d'après fragments de 'Vie et destin' de Vassily Grossman", 2 moments musicaux, 2 pièce narratives, Allégories, Digressions, La valleuse aux fées for Piano Four Hands.

Description: The second sonata is programmatically linked to Vasily Grossman's account of the Nazi death camps. The work begins innocuously enough, but soon the mood darkens dramatically, and the full import of the music's message emerges. Throughout, there is a clear affinity with Shostakovich in the music's tonality, melodic contour and dramatic flow. The much earlier First was written in memory of Nadia Boulanger, with whom Marchand studied. This is a more neo-romantic work, with echoes of Rachmaninov, Chopin, Debussy and Ravel, in three eloquent, elegiac movements. Digressions is a set of brief, enigmatic variations exploring a variety of pianistic styles, all basically tonal and in a broadly mid-20th century idiom. The other pieces, pianistically effective miniatures all, are tonal, and indebted to similar romantic models as the first sonata, sometimes with the composer's French antecedents to the fore, as in La valleuse aux fées and the first Moment musical, and sometimes more indebted to Russian romanticism - the second Moment musical, or the first Pièce narrative. The closest approach to any modernist tendencies occurs in the dissonances of the Allégories, brief responses to the styles of three visual artists, and a brief episode of hammered rhythm directly on the strings in the second sonata, all the more shocking for its sudden, transient appearance. Aurélien Richard (piano), Jean-Pierre Ferey (four hands).