1. Cello Sonata, FP 143 I. Allegro - Tempo di Marcia (5:56)

2. Cello Sonata, FP 143II. Cavatine (6:24)

3. Cello Sonata, FP 143III. Ballabile (3:24)

4. Cello Sonata, FP 143IV. Finale (6:44)

5. Papillon, Op. 77 (3:03)

6. Elégie (4:19)

7. Deux pièces pour violon et piano: Nocturne (2:58)

8. Deux pièces pour violon et piano: Cortège (1:41)

9. Trois Pièces I. Moderé (2:37)

10. Trois Pièces II. Sans vitesse et à l'aise (1:30)

11. Trois Pièces III. Vite et nerveusement rythmé (2:37)

12. Kaddish (5:48)

13. Cello Sonata in D Minor, L. 135 I. Prologue (4:29)

14. Cello Sonata in D Minor, L. 135 II. Sérénade (3:35)

15. Cello Sonata in D Minor, L. 135 III. Finale (3:47)

16. Après un rêve, Op. 7, No. 1 (3:05)

Years ago, when I first met composer Ned Rorem at his Upper West Side New York apartment, he philosophised, “Music is divided into two camps: French and German. And if you don’t know to which you belong, then you are definitely in the German camp.” Of course, he was a Francophile through and through. With all of the time he spent in Paris, I was surprised to learn that Ned never studied directly with Nadia Boulanger, the illustrious and ubiquitous composition pedagogue; rather, over the years, they became close acquaintances. In a May 23, 1982, New York Times book review, titled “The Composer and the Teacher,” Ned concludes, “Her contagious enthusiasm was no tacit encouragement for random emoting, but a demonstration that structure, art’s sovereign ingredient, need not be always dull, and that to write down your dreams you must be wide awake.” If structure is the quintessential priority, then what exactly did Ned mean about the German and French camps? I always understood it to be a debate between structure and color, or the abstract and the pictorial. We can all debate what makes this album French, but there is no question that the composers, as idiosyncratic as they all may be, proudly embrace a French identity and voice. In various ways each composer engages and attempts to break from Germanic tradition and embrace exoticism -- an openness to absorbing cultures from Asia and the New World, among others. Rather than renounce structure, they dream of bending forms, searching for new paths. They take classical symmetry and compositional norms only as a starting point, deliberately breaking rules to feed their free spirits, and their imaginations are steeped in the poetics of the French language. Even in the darkest, most ominous times, these composers never lose sight of their core joie de vivre.

Much of the music on this collection frames the twentieth century’s two world wars. Although there are moments of darkness and solemnity – notably Ravel’s Kaddish and Milhaud’s Élégie – the music is remarkably colorful, a celebration of life. The cello and piano are in constant conversation, intertwined, playfully teasing and provoking each other, fantastical and carefree in their escapades.

At the heart of the program are two sets of short pieces by sisters Lili and Nadia Boulanger. Despite years of chronic illness, which took her life at the young age of 25, Lili managed to write prolifically, and was the first female composer to win the prestigious Prix de Rome, in 1913. Her older sister, Nadia, had been turned down for the same prize four times, and would continue throughout her life to consider Lili to be “the most important female composer in history.” As a result, Nadia eventually gave up composing, devoting herself instead to the promotion of her sister’s music, and to pedagogy. Nadia taught generations of important composers, including Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Philip Glass, and innumerable others. Both sets of pieces on this album, Nadia’s Trois pièces (1914) and Lili’s Deux pièces from 1911 and 1914 respectively, have a youthful vibrancy to them. Lili’s two pieces, one a slumbering song (Nocturne), the other a wide-eyed, heart-skipping spectacle of a parade (Cortège), are originally for violin and piano. I have arranged them for cello, leaving much of the high-register string writing intact. Nadia’s Trois pièces are originally for cello and piano, and feature a dreamlike, floating melody over an impressionistic pond, a playfully naive canon between the two instruments, and a theatrical finale that pushes beyond the Victorian boundaries and hints at the musical risk taking of Francis Poulenc.

Only a year following the Boulangers’ Cortège and Trois pièces, and in the midst of World War I, Claude Debussy set out to compose six sonatas in neo-baroque style, inspired by the 18th century French musical giants, Rameau and Couperin. Debussy sought to embrace and immortalize French history and culture, celebrating his nationalistic roots. Interrupted by his untimely death in 1918, the composer only completed three works of the cycle, including the Sonata for Cello and Piano (1915). Although he is striving for a purely French music, and although it is permeated by the baroque French Overture rhythmic contour, I have long thought Debussy’s first movement to be a direct response to an Austro-Hungarian precursor. The opening of Beethoven’s Op. 102 No. 2 Sonata, like the Debussy Sonata, begins with piano alone, the cello entering with a dramatic transitional gesture spanning a wide pitch range and offering an asymmetrical answer to the tableau established by the piano. Debussy may be looking to break free of classical rules, but he is fully aware of and steeped in tradition.

A commedia dell-arte sensibility permeates the Sonata. I can hear the narrative of Pierrot Lunaire and his interactions with Columbine throughout the three movements, perhaps most descriptively in the second movement, a seductive and ironic Serenade. The cello’s pizzicato strumming, like a guitar, the eerie timbre of the harmonics, the flautando high register, and the slapstick abruptness of the phrase punctuations all transport us to a dramatic stage filled with vibrant characters.

Only after the Serenade are we liberated from the shackles of an older age and another place. The bohemian exoticism of the third movement – is there a brothel scene depicted in the sensual curves and gyrations of the piano’s belly dance and the opium-den stupor of the Lento with its shifting and alluring rubatos? – do we finally arrive at the mountain’s summit, where the solo cello can openly proclaim its freedom.

A year before Debussy’s Sonata for Cello and Piano, Maurice Ravel was commissioned by soprano Alvina Alvi for a set of two songs. Ravel composed and accompanied her at the piano in his new work, Deux mélodies hébraïques. Nearly two decades after the seminal Émile Zola editorial J’Accuse, which made public the anti-semitic and unlawful jailing of Jewish French Army General Staff officer Alfred Dreyfus, Ravel shows his solidarity and empathy for the Jewish people and their culture. On this recording, I play my own instrumental arrangement of the second song, a rendition of the Mourner’s Kaddish, the prayer for the dead in Jewish services. The cello takes on the role of cantor as the piano creates eternal ever-expanding space. Although Ravel was not Jewish, his setting is moving in its heartfelt simplicity and authenticity. The prayer begins with the words “glorified and sanctified be God’s name”; never once is there a mention of death, only an exaltation of God and a call and cry for the creation of peace.

Born in Marseille, France, to Jewish parents, the prolific composer Darius Milhaud was forced to leave France in 1940 upon the invasion of his native country by Nazi Germany. The family emigrated to the United States, where Milhaud secured a teaching post at Mills College in Oakland, California. By this time, he had already embraced a range of musical styles and languages, most notably jazz, Brazilian influences, and polytonality. These colors can be heard in Milhaud’s Élégie, a ballad composed in 1945, at the end of World War II. The melodic contour of the cello line, at times improvised in feeling, floats above and below a nostalgic appoggiatura ostinato figure in the piano. The cello part is notable for its wide pitch range – from moments of repose, breathing with the low C# pedal, to the final, hopeful, sustained A in the cello’s heavenly upper register. Milhaud follows the advice he gave one of his well known students, the singer-songwriter Burt Bacharach, “Don’t be afraid of writing something people can remember and whistle. Don’t ever feel discomfited by a melody.”

Gabriel Fauré certainly never shied away from composing a gorgeous melody. A teacher of Ravel and both Lili and Nadia Boulanger, Fauré was a prolific composer of art songs. Après un rêve (1878) is one of his most popular songs, a longing for dreams of a mysterious night, and an elusive, ecstatic love that withers in the light of day. Our instrumental song-without-words omits the text by Romain Bussine, who adapted an anonymous Italian poem. Fauré’s Papillon was published in 1898, but commissioned fourteen years earlier. This short encore piece oscillates between virtuosic moto perpetuo writing, the butterfly wings flapping in flight, and a soaring melody in the cello accompanied by a descending bass line in the piano.

Like his colleague Milhaud, Francis Poulenc was a member of Le Groupe des Six, a composer collective active in Paris from 1916-1923. The group came together to counter the overbearing musical influences of Richard Wagner, as well as the impressionism of Debussy and Ravel. Poulenc began sketching his Cello Sonata in 1940, but his work was disrupted by World War II. He finally completed the Sonata in 1948, dedicating it to the legendary French cellist, Pierre Fournier, who reportedly participated in shaping some of the technical aspects of the cello part. Neo-baroque and neo-classical in style, the four movement work is filled with melodic inspiration and irony, the relationship between the cello and piano displaying a complex camaraderie and an operatic grandiosity. Although emanating from one of the most oppressive historical periods, in Poulenc’s Sonata, love trumps darkness, filling us with a vibrant, soaring narrative that never loses its sunny optimism.

It was the Poulenc Sonata, with its mixture of love, irony and dramatic events, that first set me on the path to recording a program of French music. On a cold January day in my home studio in Montréal, a gifted student was playing the Poulenc part for me to comment. In the midst of a discussion, my cello in my hand, I reached for the score, tripped, and lost my balance. In that uncertain moment, I had a decision to make: I could let my body crash down on top of the cello, or I could open my hand and let the instrument fall away as I pulled my weight in the opposite direction. It all happened in a split-second, but for me time stopped. I let the cello go, twisting away to right myself. Stunned, I looked down at the oceanic turquoise of my studio’s Persian rug, and there lay my companion of thirty years, my friend, my musical voice, arrayed in broken pieces. The headless body lay immobile, the neck cleanly ripped off its torso leaving a gaping open wound. And, for some reason, what was even more surreal at the time? No blood.

Trying to keep my composure, I set aside the pieces of my Matteo Goffriller cello, made in 1710 Venice, and continued teaching. The fragmented, vibrant contours of Poulenc continued from across the room. I continued the back and forth with my visitor. We immersed ourselves in sculpting sound and painting phrases through bow-stroke detail. Maybe it was a dream or a nightmare? Maybe my beloved cello was still whole and ready to return to the acrobatic and effervescent world of Poulenc. But alas, it remained next to me on the floor, lifeless, its body shattered.

After delivering the pieces of my cello to pupate in the workshop of my luthier, where it would go through meticulous and painstaking reconstructive surgery over a span of fifteen months, all I could do was wait and hope that it would regain its former glow and voice. Perhaps, as with kintsugi art in Japanese culture, where the cracks and flaws of an object are celebrated with decorative gold, my cello’s new wounds would become part of the instrument’s identity. Perhaps this catastrophic event in its life was an opportunity to celebrate its resilience and ever deepening character.

This is the first album on which my beloved Goffriller and I are reunited. My butterfly finally emerged from its chrysalis. And now, two years later, in quarantine for the last four months in Montréal, who could have predicted that the world as we knew it would also be completely turned upside down.

It all feels like a dream, the 2019 recording sessions with the ever graceful and insightful Mari Kodama, my colleague and friend. Making music without a care in the world, and with no worry of social distancing and masks. We played the music of French masters to our heart’s content, and breathed the crisp, eucalyptus-scented air as we roamed the grounds of Skywalker Ranch. So bright were the stars in the mysterious night.

Matt Haimovitz
June 2020
Montréal, Québec

Release Date: June 11, 2020

Label: PENTATONE Oxingale Series (PTC 5186816)

Artist:
Matt Haimovitz, Mari Kodama

Composers: Francis Poulenc, Gabriel Fauré, Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, Darius Milhaud, Lili Boulanger, Nadia Boulanger.

Production Team
Produced by David Frost
Recording Engineer Richard King
Assistant Recording Engineer Dann Thompson
Editing Doron Schächter & David Frost
Production Associate Nathan Brandwein
Mixing David Frost
Surround Sound Mixing Richard King
Executive Producers Luna Pearl Woolf & Matt Haimovitz

Cover Photography Daniel Forniès Soria | Session Photography Larry Cheuk

Design Marjolein Coenrady | Product Management Kasper van Kooten

English Translation of Après un rêve © by Luna Pearl Woolf and Nessa Rose Woolf

This album was recorded on June 25 - 28, 2019 at Skywalker Sound, a Lucasfilm, Ltd., company, Marin County, CA