A brand new triple album from sisters Katia (left) and Marielle Labèque celebrates greater than 5 a long time of recording collectively.
Umberto Nicoletti
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Umberto Nicoletti
It was 1969, on the Paris Conservatoire, when the whole lot modified for a pair of strong-willed, piano-playing sisters from France named Katia and Marielle Labèque.
They have been training a thorny two-piano work, Visions de l’Amen, by Olivier Messiaen, one of many faculty’s lecturers and by then a legendary composer. He heard the sisters play and requested if certainly one of them want to document the piece together with his spouse. They refused, saying that they had already determined to stay collectively as a piano duo. Messiaen relented, then supervised what can be the sisters’ very first recording.
A motion of that recording closes out a brand new three-disc set by the Labèques. The album is titled 55. It incorporates 55 tracks — a toast to the sisters’ 55 years (after which some) of recording. We have now the anticipated gems from the Labèque’s substantial again catalog, repertoire requirements and favorites starting from Dvořák‘s Slavonic Dances and Gabriel Fauré‘s Dolly Suite to preparations of music by Gershwin, Bernstein and Debussy.
However the set is not any mere retrospective compilation. The shock is that almost half of the tracks are model new recordings for this mission. And with the brand new tracks, the Labèques are out to make some extent. A lot of them are written by girls composers — too typically uncared for, admittedly even by the sisters themselves. There may be sturdy music by the twentieth century Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz, who’s slowly receiving a lot deserved recognition, and a monitor by the enigmatic Ethiopian nun Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, who died in 2023. Additionally Lili Boulanger, the proficient, short-lived sister of famed pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. And the Labèques embrace a robust association of “Troubled Water” by African American composer Margaret Bonds, born in 1913.
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About half of the recordings on the set function the sisters every at their very own piano in full-throated, 2-piano duets — from Manuel de Falla‘s flamenco-infused Spanish Dance No. 1 to a rowdy “Carolina Shout” by stride jazz king James P. Johnson. The two-piano association of Stravinsky‘s Ceremony of Spring feels like a feral beast bursting by means of the bins of wooden and wire.
The Labèques additionally play 4-handed repertoire — that is two individuals sitting at one piano. It is normally a extra intimate affair, with music to match, just like the sister’s traditional recordings of Ravel‘s Mom Goose and Bizet‘s delicate Jeux d’enfants. However in addition they faucet into lesser-known French composers like Marie Jaëll, a pal of Liszt, who in 1893 was the primary French pianist to carry out all 32 of Beethoven‘s sonatas. In her little waltz, Op. 8, No. 8, the Labèques deliver out the music’s beguiling mixture of darkish shadows and French attraction.
The three-disc set is a far-reaching treasure trove that even permits the sisters to step away from one another for a couple of alternative moments. Katia takes up with Chick Corea on the Invoice Evans customary “We Will Meet Once more,” and performs music by the American William Duckworth and the Croatian Dora Pejačević, whereas Marielle solos on tracks by Erik Satie, the U.Ok.’s Howard Skempton and Bryce Dessner, of the American indie rock band The Nationwide.
What Messiaen heard within the Labèques’ taking part in stays their calling card — extraordinary precision, ending one another’s musical sentences, plus heat of tone and a palpable fearlessness.
For over a half century, Katia and Marielle Labèque have, properly, four-handedly redefined what music made for a pair of pianists can sound like. And this new 55-track album proves it.
