Two Piano Albums, Two Stars Each: When Labels Let Pianists Indulge

Hyperion's Women and the Piano and Erato's Mémoire from Alexandre Tharaud each earn three stars out of five — or two, depending on which rating line you read — in Norman Lebrecht's latest Album of the Week review for The Critic. Both records share the same flaw: they are passion projects, and passion projects, Lebrecht writes, are usually a disaster.

"Every now and then a record label allows a pianist to present an album of favourite pieces," Lebrecht observes. "The result is usually a disastrous indulgence." Both new releases, he argues, take the listener "halfway to whimsy, for where there is no turning back."

What went wrong on Women and the Piano?

Susan Tomes, described by Lebrecht as a media-friendly English pianist, sets out to survey what women have written for the keyboard. The opening stretch fails. Her first three composers, from the late 18th and early 19th centuries, show, in Lebrecht's verdict, "nothing that might be mistaken for originality." He is blunter still: "Mozart's wet-nurse could have written better."

The album changes at track 9. There Tomes reaches Fanny Mendelssohn, whom Lebrecht calls "more assertive than her brother and no less gifted" — with far more to say than a four-minute miniature can hold. Clara Schumann follows, sounding, he writes, "more like the young Brahms than her confused husband," her G minor Romance "darkly compelling, tinged with tragedy."

Later stops bring Sophie Menter, whom Lebrecht finds "a bit swoony"; Teresa Carreño, whose brazen incorporation of Happy Birthday leaves him asking how she escaped its litigious originators; and Amy Beach, who shows "a surprising gift for impressionism." Then a harder question: the youngest of these women died in 1944. Lebrecht asks whether nothing has developed since.

Does Tharaud's French survey fare better?

Only slightly. Alexandre Tharaud traces French pianism from Couperin, circa 1700, through the impressionists and post-impressionists to Jean-Michel Damase, who died in 2013. The problem is sameness. By Lili Boulanger — whom Lebrecht pointedly asks to see added to Tomes' album — "a sameness has set in." When Reynaldo Hahn sounds indistinguishable from Darius Milhaud, he argues, something has been lost in both repertoire choice and interpretation. "The ear cries out for a burst of Boulez or Barbara or Michel Legrand."

What does this change for listeners?

Neither album is a write-off. Tomes delivers a genuine find in Fanny Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann; Tharaud covers three centuries of a national tradition. But both cases suggest the fault lies upstream — with the advice, or lack of it, that labels give artists allowed to curate themselves. Hence Lebrecht's closing posture, borrowed from the old gag: don't shoot the pianist. The pianists, on this evidence, were simply let loose without an editor — and until labels resume that curatorial role, the whimsy project will keep arriving at three stars and sticking there.