The piano music Déodat de Sévérac (1872-1921) composed during his short career abounds with charm, humor, and idiomatic assurance, along with a harmonic palette that reflects his teachers D’Indy, Magnard, and Chabrier on one hand, and his younger colleague Ravel on the other. Three-fourths of Volume 2 in Jordi Masó’s comprehensive Sévérac cycle is given over to short character pieces.
I, for one, can’t resist the miniatures comprising both books of En Vacances. Each piece is a gem. For example, imagine Poulenc rewriting Schumann’s Von Fremden Ländern und Menschen from Kinderszenen and you’ll appreciate Book 1’s opening Invocation. And who would suspect that the brooding arpeggio introduction to La Fontaine de Chopin leads into a whimsical waltz tune sequence? There’s an ambitious and technically formidable 15-minute fantasy, Sous les lauriers roses, that opens with an evocation of Catalan drums, continues with a petulant waltz, and includes an imaginative cuckoo passage.
Masó fares best in the simpler works. However, when the going gets tough, he falls short of Aldo Ciccolini’s far more supple, scintillating, and tonally resourceful EMI performances from the 1970s, which are more attractively reproduced compared to Naxos’ ample yet relatively dry pick-up (EMI France once reissued the Ciccolini Sévérac cycle complete on three CDs, and it’s well worth hunting down). Listeners new to Sévérac will value Keith Anderson’s well-researched and informative annotations.
