ERIC LE SAGE - Hanging Gardens | CD

An eminent representative of the French school of piano, pianist Eric Le Sage offers a new album in the form of a poetic stroll through the secret gardens of 22 French composers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Between the Belle Époque and the Roaring Twenties, around two world wars from which it was necessary to heal, in the vertigo of all rebirths and that of progress on the march, music also needed calm, humanity, and natural intimacy. While twenty-two French composers cultivate their secret soul in a few pianistic miniatures, electricity, the gramophone, the bicycle, the Parisian metro... are already inviting themselves into people's daily lives. Women emerge, emancipate themselves, and re-color a struggling society that demands a fairer sharing of goods, of the joy of living, and also the right to carelessness. Music then somewhat escapes the new artistic tempo of this era: Dadaism, Surrealism. The language of musicians evolves, but without expressing the same urgency for rupture, for liberation, as that of other artistic creators. These suspended gardens from this era are already surreal and free, seemingly less concerned with expression than with impression, with ideas than with sensations. Between César Franck, Ernest Chausson, and Jehan Alain, all three from a single century, the composers who suspended their gardens in this album almost all lived straddling the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Dupont, Cras, Aubert, D'Indy, Hahn, Ibert, Pierné, Vierne, Samazeuilh, Schmitt, Chaminade, Boulanger, Honegger, Tailleferre, Séverac, Saint-Saëns, Poulenc, Satie represent a particularly prolific era for French music, even if posterity will not be granted to each one in proportion to their talent. Their suspended gardens, often secret, always interior, are undoubtedly not representative of all the artistic ambitions that their protagonists displayed throughout their work, but they present themselves with depth and sincerity as many small, unrecognized refuges. Evoking with talent nature and its bucolic landscapes, each of these compositions offers its interpretation of a colorful post-romanticism that contributes to the retention of time, inviting just the right amount of mystery and nostalgia.