Empire of Sound

In February 1913, having received the score of Le Sacre du Printemps, Claude Debussy wrote to Igor Stravinsky: “For me, who descend the other slope of the hill but keep, however, an intense passion for music, for me it is a special satisfaction to tell you how much you have enlarged the boundaries of the permissible in the empire of sound.” The phrase gives Marco Fatichenti's album its title. For the Italian pianist, the recital is “the result of years of musing on the variety, beauty and significance” of the repertoire Stravinsky, Debussy and Granados created — three composers working separately at their pianos around 1911, each enlarging the boundaries Debussy named. Debussy and Stravinsky carried on an intriguing correspondence; Granados and Debussy had a close mutual friend in the pianist Ricardo Viñes. Fatichenti's programme finds the connections between three voices whose conversations with one another, in life and across their work, shaped what came next.

The recital opens with Stravinsky's Trois Mouvements de Pétrouchka, transcribed for solo piano in 1921 from the 1911 ballet for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. The work belongs to the Shrovetide traditions of St. Petersburg and to the figure of Pétrouchka himself — the awkward and sensitive puppet, akin to Pulcinella or Pierrot, brought to life by the Magician's touch alongside the egomaniac Moor and the aloof Ballerina. The three Mouvements open with the Russian Dance as the puppets gain life, move into Pétrouchka's cell where he pities himself and curses his master, and close with the Semaine Grasse, a pageant of dances that breaks into tragedy when the Moor kills Pétrouchka, his mask falling away to reveal the human suffering beneath. In Fatichenti's reading, the tragedy leaves the audience “wondering where the boundary is, if one exists, between reality and fairytale”.

From this dramatic opening the recital moves to Debussy's Preludes Book II, which Fatichenti hears as “visual flights of sound, depicting scenes of nature, events, and satirical or mythical figures of irresistible plasticity”. Each Prelude inhabits its own world: the shifting mists of Brouillards, the rarefied morning air of Bruyères, the scorching sun of Puerta del vino, the menacing seductions of Ondine. The Universal Exposition of 1900 had brought gamelan and other Oriental musical languages into Debussy's hearing for the first time, and these inflect La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune and Canope. Real and imagined figures populate the book — the music-hall performer Général Lavine, the pompous-then-playful Hommage à S. Pickwick, the fireworks of Feux d'artifice with its brief allusion to La Marseillaise. Wary of the term Impressionism, Debussy wrote to his editor Jacques Durand: “Music in its essence is not colour in a rigorous and traditional form. It is colours and rhythmic time.”

The recital closes with Granados's Goyescas: Los majos enamorados, which Fatichenti describes as “a towering achievement of the post-Romantic 'nationalistic' repertoire, on a par with Albéniz's Suite Iberia”. Granados, in Fatichenti's reading, “succeeded in taking Spanish music outside the niche in which it is often placed”; the folkloric rhythmical and melodic elements become “expressive means to reach a truly universal poetic language”. The suite takes inspiration from Goya's etchings Los Caprichos, the painter's condemnation of society's irrationality through scenes of tragedy, sarcasm, dark humour, and mundane demoralisation. El Amor y la Muerte, the suite's central piece, depicts a soldier mortally wounded in the arms of his lover, with the main themes of the earlier pieces returning in quasi-Wagnerian leitmotif. The closing Epílogo: Serenata del Espectro brings back the skeleton-spirit with his guitar, perhaps to serenade his bereaved lover; the Dies Irae is mournfully quoted before the spectre, by the composer's direction on the score, “disappears plucking the strings of his guitar”.