CD Review | Femmes de légende (Atma Classique, 2023)

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Femmes de légende
Élisabeth Pion, piano
Atma Classique, May 2023

Quebec pianist Élisabeth Pion’s album opens with limpid, fluid and warm playing. A magnificent symbiosis between the pianist and the skilful writing of French composer Mélanie “Mel” Bonis (1858-1937), Femmes de légende reveals charm, colour and effervescence in both Pion’s playing and the repertoire itself. A pianist whose name has been on the Quebec and international music scene for some years now, Pion asserts her undeniable talent in this album.

As its title suggests, Bonis’s work is inspired by literary and mythological heroines, and bears all the hallmarks of French writings of the period by composers such as Fauré and Ravel. A masterly work that should feature more often on pianists’ concert programs. Henri Dutilleux’s intelligent, witty writing, meanwhile, is full of humour, and follows perfectly with the piano suite, Au gré des ondes. Here again, Pion’s nuanced, seductive playing is equal to Dutilleux’s inspired pages.

The album suddenly adopts a more serious, frightening tone with Berceuse by British composer Thomas Adès. Pion’s dramatic interpretation makes a nod to the opera from which the piece originates, The Exterminating Angel.

French charm returns in Lili Boulanger’s Prélude en ré bémol majeur and Trois morceaux; which are more successful than the Thème et variations en do mineur, that follows. At the end of the program is Claude Debussy’s famous L’isle joyeuse, which seems a little impatient, even neurotic, under Pion’s virtuoso, assured fingers. It lacks the spontaneity and playfulness evident in the preceding works. The album closes gently with two charming compositions by the young pianist: Balcony on a Wednesday Night and an ornamented reprise of the Prélude, a nod to Dutilleux.

Supple, expressive, mature: these are the words that describe Élisabeth Pion’s playing. An artist whose career is one to watch. The only regrettable element of the recording is that the piano in the Domaine Forget concert hall is not always up to the task in the louder passages, although it expresses Pion’s pianissimo with ease.

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