Dukas: Works for Piano CD review – a precious glimpse into a fascinating musical mind

Paul Dukas was the most ruthlessly self-critical of great 20th-century French composers. He allowed just 15 of his works to be published in his lifetime. While a host of early pieces did come to light after his death in 1935, among the mature scores that he is thought to have destroyed were four operas, two ballets, a symphony (which would have been his second) and a symphonic poem. What Dukas did leave for posterity, then, is precious, and reveals one of the most fascinating musical minds of his time. He was a contemporary of Debussy and Ravel who hovered around the edges of modernism in the first decades of the 20th century, without ever quite making that final commitment, but who nevertheless did produce a series of wonderfully crafted and often ravishingly beautiful scores. Yet he is known now almost exclusively for one relatively early, and in some ways atypical orchestral showpiece, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

Almost half of the pieces that Dukas did acknowledge were composed for piano. Hervé Billaut’s well-filled disc omits three of the smaller-scale ones, but does include the two major works, both composed around the turn of the 20th century – the huge, imposing and rather Beethovenian Piano Sonata in E flat minor, and the Variations, Interlude and Finale on a theme of Rameau. He plays them both with just the right combination of rigour and flair, bringing out every colour in the more virtuosic Rameau variations. These are just as dazzling as anything in Ravel, and he lays out the huge form of the sonata – the longest surviving piece that Dukas wrote, apart from his opera Ariane et Barbe-bleue, which was composed at much the same time – with total authority and clarity.

But most intriguing and touching of all is the shortest piece here, La Plainte, au Loin, du Faune ..., which Dukas composed in 1920 for a volume of tributes to Debussy. His exquisite five-minute memorial is woven out of the flute solo that begins the Prélude à l’Aprés-Midi. As well as being a heartfelt tribute, it seems to be a regretful, nostalgic glimpse into the world that Debussy opened up in that work, a world that Dukas knew he too might have entered, but which, for whatever reason, he felt he unable to join.