Magda Tagliaferro - Le Piano Français de Chabrier à Debussy

Stunning recordings by one of the most celebrated performers of French classical music, Brazilian born Magdalena Tagliaferro, who knew and worked with most of the composers she ending up recording and promoting the work: Reynaldo Hahn dedicated his piano concerto to her, she played with Gabriel Fauré, and helped Debussy gained worldwide recognition. Expensive Stereo pressing, numbered: 26. Excellent condition (name of the previous owner written on the back of the sleeve).

While the second side is dedicated to Claude Debussy, featuring dazzling "Arabesques", the first side includes the work of lesser-known composers, Déodat de Séverac, and Marcel Proust's lover Reynaldo Hahn, whose "Rêverie du Prince Eglantine" is my personal highlight of the album. And indeed, "Le piano français de Chabrier à Debussy" is a Proustian rêverie: richly furnished salons echoing piano recitals and bursts of distingués laughters lie somewhere behind the speakers. The elegance and delicacy of Tagliaferro's playing shares something with the way Max Ophüls's films Danielle Darrieux in The Earrings of Madame De... or the slow tracking shots of Resnais Last Year At Marienbad : a definitively French languor.

"Born in Petrópolis, Brazil, on January 19, 1894, Magdalena Tagliaferro learned the piano very early with her father and began a career as a child prodigy. She worked with Antonin Marmontel at the Paris Conservatoire, where she won a first prize for piano in 1908, the same year as her Parisian debut at the Salle Érard. Then she became a student of Alfred Cortot, "for the rest of her life" to the point of keeping alive to an extreme degree the qualities and defects of the master: precise virtuosity, a sometimes excessive sense of rubato and a marvelous skill in masking memory lapses that were becoming more and more frequent. Particularly at ease in the French repertoire, she demonstrated a sensitivity and taste that would be in some way the counterpoint to the mannerism of Marguerite Long and her disciples. She too had known Claude Debussy; She played two pianos with Gabriel Fauré and helped make their music known worldwide. She played with the Capet Quartet, with Jacques Thibaud and Pablo Casals. Reynaldo Hahn dedicated his Piano Concerto to her, which she recorded under his direction, as well as Mozart's Concerto K. 482.

In 1940, the French government sent her to the United States to promote French music. She spent the war years in Brazil, where she played throughout the country and devoted herself to teaching, a period that Brazilian musicians still refer to as the "Tagliaferro Revolution." To the French repertoire, she added a second hobbyhorse: the music of Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, whom she had met in Paris between the two wars and who composed several works for her (Momo precoce). Back in France, in 1957 she founded an international piano competition that bears her name and regularly gave public performance classes from 1959 onward. For thirty-nine years, she refused to play in the United States before being persuaded by an article by the famous New York critic Harold Schonberg: she made her triumphant Carnegie Hall debut in 1979, eclipsing the successes of Vladimir Horowitz". (Source : Encyclopedia.com)

Tracklist

1. Scherzo-Valse
2. Idylle
3. Le Retour Des Muletiers
4. Les Rêveries Du Prince Eglantine
5. Etude En Forme De Valse
6. Pour Le Piano (Prélude / Sarabande / Toccata)
7. Arabesque N°1 et N°2
8. L'Isle Joyeuse