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William Youn (piano); Berlin Radio SO\/Valentin Uryupin<\/p>
Sony Classical G010005158252Y\u00a0\u00a087:01 mins<\/em><\/p> Releases presenting less than familiar repertory are always welcome, and this one explores some intriguing byways of the musical world of Paris in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. The quality on offer varies. The rippling fluency of Reynaldo Hahn<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s idiom seems to have led him to bypass the need to put together a convincing three-movement design in his Piano Concerto of 1931; his method was evidently to let one idea follow the next, and proclaim the result \u2018free fantasy\u2019. The result is outwardly agreeable and inwardly bland.<\/p> Faur\u00e9<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s way of conjuring his music, as if it was improvised in the moment and then written down, resembles Hahn\u2019s approach to that extent. But he does this using fewer notes, and with a much surer sense of purpose; the whimsical opening melody of his early Ballade, presented first by the piano and then together with a solo flute, could have been written by no other composer. The rest of the work happily sustains this level, and while the Fantaisie<\/em> of Faur\u00e9\u2019s old age is a patchier creation, its later stages find an impressive surge and flow. <\/p> The idiom of the young Nadia Boulanger\u2019s Fantaisie vari\u00e9e<\/em> is strikingly at odds with her subsequent lifelong work as a teacher<\/a><\/strong> committed to neo-classical musical values; this is music with a sombre and powerful emotional charge. William Youn\u2019s playing throughout is accomplished and stylish, with a full-value orchestral contribution to match. But his brilliant-edged, very modern keyboard tone is some distance away from the mellower soundworld that these composers would have known, and feels particularly at odds with his likeable solo arrangements of songs by Hahn and Faur\u00e9.<\/p>