Complex piano music played with sensitivity and grace

Cécile Chaminade: Piano Music

Nearly all of the considerable strengths of Cécile Chaminade are on display in this new disc by pianist Mark Viner, a well chosen program that ranges from the lightest salon pieces to fiercely virtuosic display pieces to works of complexity and profound depth. For those who don't know Chaminade's music, the Poème provençal, Op.127, from 1908, is a real stunner. Certainly it's atmospheric, and effective landscape painting, but as absolute music its four movements together aren't out of place in the company of great piano works from Chopin to Debussy. Viner plays it with sensitivity and grace, sustaining the long, beautiful melodies, but not milking them with sentimentality.

Poème provençal, 1908. Gallica, Bibliothèque nationale de France

Indeed, Viner's strong playing makes the old canards against Chaminade - bathos, mawkishness, melodrama - seem ludicrous. The sheer, simple beauty of a small piece like Méditation, the last of the 6 Romances sans paroles, Op.76, is reason enough to buy this album.

But this is about more than just the obviously beautiful. It's a multi-faceted, three-dimensional portrait of a major composer for the piano, and a significant achievement for Mark Viner and Piano Classics.