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"The rarefied, oxygenated climate of 20th century French piano music is a world unto itself. The stellar creations of much of this repertoire are object lessons in paradox, at once subtle evocations of the fantastic as well as systoles of the rational. Indeed, there is an epigrammatic quality that links much of Debussy's late music to that of his contemporary, Ravel and yet again to their successor, Olivier Messiaen. (1908-1992).Perhaps that's why it is no small irony that the exquisite listening apparatus of a sensational young Italian pianist, Luca Trabucco, invests these highly symbolic (but hardly impressionist!) works with a wholly new perspective. Mr. Trabucco, an award winning composer as well as a pianist, has won his share of international competitions, but there is a great deal more going on behind his fabulous fingers than any prurient need for empty display. Mr. Trabucco, who challenges status quo interpretations that value the implicit opulence of this repertoire, is very much his own man. While the pedants might find his playing perverse for its refusal to indulge in interpretive clichés, I find it endlessly engaging and fascinating. In Ravel's fanciful suite, Tombeau de Couperin, where Mr. Trabucco's sound is exceptionally bright and his tempi unusually swift, not so much as a strand of the counterpoint is ambiguous, either for its role in the texture nor for its purpose. In his hands Jeux d'Eaux, too, becomes utterly weightless and transparent. In Debussy's ephemeral preludes, Mr. Trabucco is likewise an ethereal interpreter. He proceeds without fear, for example, in the slow, reflective, and ever so melancholy Des pas sur la neige and again in the mysterious Voiles, exploiting, as few others have dared, the very thing that so ironically brings them to life: stasis. In Messiaen's spacious, sometimes brutal and always hypnotic etudes, Mr. Trabucco is right at home. In Mode de Valeurs et d'Intensite, he indulges the work's mathematically calculated abstractions and innumerable pitch-obsessions with admirable intensity. But then again, that's no surprise: Mr. Trabucco is himself a heady, yet remarkably intense musician. Luca Trabucco, then, belongs to that elite class of musicians whose playing moves light years beyond the merely instrumental, and into the realm of the conceptual. Rarely has any pianist, save Michelangeli or Gieseking, brought to the French repertoire, and so much else besides, such ineffable tranparency, imagination and elegance."
JOHN BELL YOUNG
The St. Petersburg Times
To purchase Luca Trabucco's CD on the Phoenix Classcial Label, which includes the selections on this website, please visit:
LUCA TRABUCCO plays DEBUSSY, RAVEL & MESSIAEN
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CD: LUCA TRABUCCO plays Ravel-Debussy-Messiaen
Label: PHOENIX CLASSICS CD# 99504
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CD: LUCA TRABUCCO plays Debussy, Ravel and Messiaen
Label: PHOENIX CLASSICS CD# 99504
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| From "Le Tombeau de Couperin" |
CD: LUCA TRABUCCO plays Ravel, Debussy and Messiaen
Label: PHOENIX CLASSICS CD# 99504
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