Alexandre Tansman - 24 Intermezzi; Piano Sonata No. 5 (Hanna Holeksa)

Information

Composer: Alexandre Tansman

• 24 Intermezzi, Books 1–4
• Piano Sonata No. 5 “À la mémoire de Béla Bartók”

Hanna Holeksa, piano

Date: 2021

Label: DUX

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Review

Polish pianist Hanna Holeksa offers us a new and superb recording of Alexandre Tansman’s rare Twenty-Four Intermezzi, composed on the eve of the Second World War. The anthology is completed by the imposing Piano Sonata No. 5, written fifteen years later and dedicated to the memory of Béla Bartók.

After extensive musical studies in his native Poland, Alexandre Tansman moved to Paris in 1919, where he was introduced to Ravel, who was captivated by the young man’s multifaceted and iconoclastic talent. Thanks to this connection, the young composer-pianist was able to meet Bartók, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, the composers of Les Six, Roussel, and to become acquainted with other young lions from Eastern Europe who had come to perfect their art on the banks of the Seine: Martinů, Harsanyi, Tcherepnine, Mihalovici, and Tansman himself would form the École de Paris, a movement that considerably renewed the neoclassical landscape through the incorporation of popular and folk music, even music from outside Europe, as well as jazz. This important composer, fiercely independent and forced into exile in the United States during the Second World War, continues to be rediscovered. In particular, his multifaceted piano music—divided between charming pedagogical pieces and substantial compositional projects—is attracting increasing interest from performers.

The Twenty-Four Intermezzi date from the uncertain period of the “Phoney War.” They are arranged in four books of six pieces, composed in Paris for the first two (late 1939) and in Nice (spring and summer 1940), where Tansman was staying while preparing to leave, near the American consulate. Although he had been naturalized French by decree two years earlier, he sensed the rise in France—soon to be partly occupied by the Nazi invader—of an unprecedented wave of antisemitism and feared for the safety of himself and his family. He would eventually leave for the United States from the Mediterranean port, where several concert tours had already earned him very strong friendships, including one with Charlie Chaplin.

These twenty-four musical snapshots (each lasting between one and three minutes) obliquely evoke Chopin’s cycle of 24 Preludes (one can even find a few cryptic quotations here and there), functioning both as a genuine poetic statement by the composer and as a logbook, alternately nostalgic (the homage to Brahms in the penultimate piece), anxious (No. 21, by far the most developed, the Adagio lamentoso, later reused unchanged as the slow movement of the Fourth Sonata), or ironic (the conclusions of the first two books).

This cycle found a passionate advocate in Vladimir Jankélévitch, the philosopher of the “je-ne-sais-quoi” and the “almost-nothing” (very much in the spirit of these profound bagatelles), who was a close friend of the composer. It is all the more difficult to understand why these magnificent and masterful miniatures, each so highly distinctive, had to wait seventy years before finally being recorded! Indeed, some twelve years ago, the Belgian pianist Éliane Reyes had presented her interpretation of this four-part cycle for Naxos in its world premiere recording (ResMusica Golden Key): a fervent interpretation that remains compelling today, but perhaps a touch too objective and somewhat obscured by a recording that was too direct, and above all by a rather unremarkable piano with a very noisy action.

Hanna Holeksa, a newcomer to this repertoire, offers a more varied approach in terms of her intentions and a more sumptuous realization. She can rely on an excellent instrument, and above all on a rather luxurious recording, surrounding the Steinway Model D with a very slight but pleasant reverberation. The Polish pianist, already well known for her chamber-music work with the Vivo Trio and a prizewinner in several international competitions, places greater emphasis on the rhythmic fluidity of these pages (No. 4) or on their harmonic ambiguity (Nos. 1, 3, 7, 9, 15). The quality of her touch (particularly in Nos. 2 and 19) is consistently impressive; the sound is varied and burnished (Nos. 16 and 19), while the impeccable differentiation of the various sound planes continually disentangles the most intricate contrapuntal threads of the more cerebral pieces. Hanna Holeksa establishes the right atmosphere from the very first notes of these extremely brief pages, from the milky spleen of No. 2 to the grayish despondency of No. 5, from the sad, disillusioned tenderness of No. 7 to the most playful irony of No. 10, from the sarcastic laughter of No. 22 to reminiscences of atmospheres that are at times Ravelian (No. 11) or Romantic and salon-like, forever belonging to a bygone era (No. 15 and the homage to Brahms in No. 23), all within a nostalgia tinged with unease (No. 17).

Elsewhere, however, the performer recalls the legacy of the New Objectivity in the manner of Toch or Hindemith (No. 3), through relentless rhythmic ostinatos (No. 5) or the most austere contrapuntal neoclassicism (the fugue of No. 6). This objective clarity leads her to revel in the text’s enchantments: the Neo-Scriabinian turns and trills of No. 8 are delightfully sketched; so too is the sophisticated rhythmic dislocation of the Allegro barbaro (a Bartókian wink) in the Tempo di marcia of No. 12, the relentless incisiveness of the almost jazzy accents of No. 14, and the deliberately brutal character of No. 18. This ideally versatile approach reaches, quite rightly, the height of anxious and desperate expression in the terrifying Adagio lamentoso of No. 21, while also employing a strategy of bitter detachment to close the cycle (No. 24), on tiptoe, as it were, opening the door onto an uncertain future.

Where Éliane Reyes had chosen to complete her disc by recording (also in a world premiere) the Petite Suite of 1917–19, delightfully poetic despite (or perhaps because of?) its pedagogical purpose, together with the brief Valse-Impromptu of 1940, Hanna Holeksa has opted instead for the much more substantial Piano Sonata No. 5 of 1955, composed to mark the tenth anniversary of Béla Bartók’s death. The qualities of touch and poetry already noted are particularly effective in the two central movements, while the outer movements, performed with steely determination, reveal a pianist who is as flawless as she is brilliant and virtuosic, effortlessly negotiating all the rhythmic traps and the deliberately more percussive character of the outer movements. A beautiful and eloquent conclusion to this masterful recording.

—  Benedict Hévry

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Alexander Tansman (12 June 1897 – 15 November 1986) was a Polish-born French composer. Born in Łódź to Jewish parents, he studied piano, composition and conducting before earning a law degree from Warsaw University. After moving to Paris in 1919, he gained recognition as a pianist and composer, influenced particularly by Stravinsky and Ravel. His international career included performances and tours across Europe, Asia and America. During World War II, he fled to Los Angeles with his family. Although he continued composing prolifically after returning to Paris, his neo-Classical style gradually fell out of favor.

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Hanna Holeksa is a Polish pianist. A graduate of the Academy of Music in Katowice and Hochschule der Künste Bern, she has received numerous international awards, including first prize at the F. Liszt National Piano Competition. Her extensive collaborative experience encompasses instrumentalists and vocalists across diverse disciplines. As a soloist and chamber musician, she appears internationally with a repertoire ranging from Baroque to contemporary works. Her scholarly work focuses particularly on Karol Szymanowski, culminating in a PhD dissertation in 2011. She currently lectures at the Academy of Music in Poznań.

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