Andre Mathieu

[mbhaub]

This week I've been listening to a beautiful cd of music by a French-Canadian composer I'd never heard of, Andre Mathieu (1929 - 1968). He's modern in the temporal sense, but his piano concerto could have been written by Rachmaninoff! It's chock full of good tunes, exciting development, and the all pianistic fireworks you could want. This is  romantic music to the max. The cd also has a short 4 movement suite, Ballet Scenes and 4 songs for chorus and orchestra. If you're fearful of 20th century music, fear not. This is gorgeous music, easily assimilated and not academic or boring in the least. It's on the Alalekta label (AN 2 9281) and features the Tucson Symphony with their regular conductor, George Hanson and pianist Alain Lefevre. Highly recommended.

[Mark Thomas]

Thanks, Martin. I've been wondering about getting hold of this for some time but was put off by some rather patronising reviews I'd read online. I'll track it down. Didn't Mathieu have a rather sad life: classic tale of a child prodigy for whom adult life went wrong?

[Alan Howe]

Very interesting indeed. Have you tried the PC by Vittorio Giannini, just out on Naxos? Now that's what I call the ultimate in Romanticism from a composer born 'out of time', as it were...

[mbhaub]

That's on order! I've been interested in Giannini since playing the 3rd symphony for wind band some 35 years ago. A local orchestra played the 2nd symphony several years ago and I have to say I was less than impressed. Bored mostly. A lot of notes all for nothing. I have high hopes for the new cd and it has certainly received a lot of good reviews.

[Gareth Vaughan]

Andre Mathieu's music is really beautiful. I've mentioned his piano concertos once before, I think - but only in passing.

[TerraEpon]

I have the new piano concerto and four songs from eMusic (and originally, DLed free on SpiralFrog, but that site is gone so the files don't work anymore...), but I also have the solo piano disc on CD which is great as well, and the Rhapsodie Romantique from eMusic as well (the last of which is actually a longer version of the middle movement of the piano concerto #4 being talked about. Both are worthwhile with a theme I can even hum now...)

But the best is probably the Concerto de Quebec, which is...well it didn't get top marks for nothing. It's paired with Gershwin's concerto and Addinsell's Warsaw Rhapsody, but even those two are worth buiying a new recording of for the CdQ...

[Amphissa]

 
Rachmaninoff himself gave the stamp of approval to this young man. Critics often complain that Mathieu's music for piano and orchestra is too derivative of romantic influences of Rachmaninoff, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, et al. But he had a talent for putting those influences together in an interesting and entertaining way. I'd put his work at the level of Scharwenka rather than Rachmaninoff, but not shabby at all. Very enjoyable music and well worth the price of admission.

[John Boyer]

I just encountered Mathieu for the first time tonight.  While others hear Rachmaninoff, I hear -- at least in his Piano Trio and his Piano Quintet -- Maurice Ravel. Indeed, you could almost pass these off as Ravel in a "guess the composer" game.

[Gerhard Griesel]

On the Analekta Label CD where Mathieu's PC No. 4 is found, this interesting story regarding PC No. 4 appears on the insert:

'Let's go back in time a little. On September 21, 2005 at André-Mathieu Hall in Laval, Quebec, Alain Lefèvre was performing the Concerto de Québec for the Orchestre symphonique de Laval's season opener. After the concert, as the audience was leaving, a couple lingered behind, the woman apparently wanting a word with Alain Lefèvre. With much emotion, she told him she knew André Mathieu, and that she was even his last sweetheart. The woman then handed him a bag, telling him it should rightly be his. Alain asked for her address and phone number so he could thank her, but her companion, ill at ease, led her away and put an end to the encounter. In the bag, between two sheets of brown cardboard, were five vinyl records with André Mathieu's handwriting on the center labels. The ten sides contained four works: Laurentienne (1946), the Sonata for violin and piano (1949) and excerpts from the 1949 Trio. The huge surprise, though, was on the last four sides. There could be no mistake–Mathieu's hieroglyphic handwriting read: Piano Concerto No. 4 .

'At first, Lefèvre thought this was yet another version of the Concerto de Québec, also known as the Symphonie romantique, Concerto romantique and Concerto No. 3. So why not another version of the composer's signature work, Mathieu's improvisational genius being so well documented? After having the four sides transcribed, though, it became quite obvious this was a new and unknown work, perhaps one of Mathieu's strongest and boldest. The second movement was later reworked by Mathieu into the Rhapsodie romantique, but the first and third movements revealed what was probably his best work, most representative of his "modern Romanticism."

'Now let's travel even further back in time. In September 1946 André Mathieu set sail for Paris to work with Arthur Honegger. Upon his return to Montreal at the end of the summer of 1947 he undoubtedly already had the Piano Concerto No. 4 in his luggage since he played two of its movements on the October 8 Radio-Canada show Radio-Carabin. He programmed the work at every one of his concerts from 1948 to 1955. It is impossible to know, however, when André Mathieu made those records, especially since he had left other recorded testimonies of the work in the form of individual movements and even an abridged version of the concerto. Putting together these various source materials, Alain Lefèvre asked the composer and conductor Gilles Bellemare to take on the colossal task of putting together a workable score.

'Working from just these tinny sounds, Gilles Bellemare had to take down the entire work in musical dictation, devise a coherent piano score, and deduce what should be allocated to the orchestra or the piano. That done, he had to substitute his own ears for Mathieu's in order to determine the nature of the accompaniment and of the orchestration. Luckily, Bellemare was well acquainted with the composer's compositional and pianistic styles, having previously revised the score of the Rhapsodie romantique and published a new edition of twelve piano pieces by André Mathieu.

'Everything finally fell wonderfully into place so that the three concerts of May 8, 9 and 11, 2008 in Tucson, Arizona were a musical celebration that we can all now share in, thanks to this recording.'