A harpsichord for Marcel Proust by Olivier Baumont ECL2204E

Product details :

Artist : Olivier Baumont, harpsichord

Program : works by Eugène Anthiome , Johann Sebastian Bach, Jacques Champion Sieur de La Chapelle, François Couperin, Reynaldo Hahn, Leontzi Honauer, Jules Massenet, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Maurice Ravel and Domenico Scarlatti

Access to the digital booklet.

Overview :

In 2022, as we commemorate a hundred years since Marcel Proust’s death, playing the harpsichord might seem a rather odd way of remembering the writer… Yet it is not about a harpsichord that Marcel Proust had at his home or that belonged to him - it is a harpsichord for Marcel Proust. This is a harpsichordist of today paying tribute to the author of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, a man who lived during an all-too-often overlooked period in the instrument’s history. There was a fascinating revival of interest in Early Music in France both during the period in which À la Recherche du Temps Perdu is set and also as it was being written, with publishers, performers, teachers and instrument makers all encouraging an ever-growing audience to take an interest in music of this kind.

As was also the case with paintings, the young Marcel Proust (1871-1922) showed as much interest in the music of the past as in that of his own time. If we restrict ourselves solely to the composers who appear on this recording, the author mentions Johann Sebastian Bach, François Couperin, Jean-Philippe Rameau and Domenico Scarlatti, as well as his friend Reynaldo Hahn, Jules Massenet (who was Hahn’s teacher) and Maurice Ravel in his letters and works and, every now and again, Proust even mentions a harpsichord, a spinet, etc.

Olivier Baumont’s recital - which also features the soprano Ingrid Perruche, the violinist Pierre-Éric Nimylowycz, and the harpsichordist Nicolas Mackowiak - alternates between pieces of music that have links to real people (such as Léon Delafosse, Reynaldo Hahn and Louis Diémer), and others that have links to characters created by Marcel Proust in À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (e.g. Albertine Simonet, Charles Morel and the Narrator). The record’s centrepiece is Eugène Anthiome’s Toccata, recorded here for the first time, which was in some ways the starting point for this whole programme, as it is dedicated to the composer and virtuoso Léon Delafosse, the model for Charles Morel in À la Recherche.

Anna de Noailles described Proust as a “pure harpsichord player”. In the Nouveau Larousse Illustré dictionary edited by Claude Augé, published between 1897 and 1904, the entry for “CLAVECIN” (harpsichord) includes a little-known definition of the word. In poetry, “clavecin” “is a word used to describe all of a poet’s resources, the full scope of his or her genius”. So “pure harpsichord” really is a lavish, wonderful way of describing the “full scope” of Proust’s genius!