YUNCHAN LIM / MINSOO SOHN

Transcribing the Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune for piano was at first sight an impossible project: how could the miracle of Debussy’s orchestration be heard under the fingers of the keyboard alone? Caplet rose to the challenge with brio, the two-piano formula giving the music a slight spatialisation that did justice to the composer’s science of resonance, and putting harmony back at the center of the soundscape of the score’s 110 bars. The number of bars is by the way no coincidence: it is the number of alexandrines in Mallarmé’s poem on which the Prélude is based.

Another rarity is the two-piano version of Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, which the composer conceived in conjunction with the orchestral version, and which he is said to have performed at a private party in 1942 with no less a person than Vladimir Horowitz as his stage companion. This lavish work, directly inspired by the composer’s life in the United States and his nostalgia for his native country, should have been the subject of a ballet, but the death of Fokine, the presumed choreographer, in August 1942 put an end to the project.  

The Rosenkavalier Suite, on the other hand, takes us back to the splendour of the nineteenth century on the Old Continent. Two Viennese waltzes, a brilliant Overture and the heart-rending harmonic explorations of the Presentation of the Rose and the final Trio condense into twenty minutes the plot of one of the most popular and nostalgic operas of the last century.