Biography

“Instrumentally intimidating, intellectually astonishing, and musically overwhelming,” proclaimed Alain Lompech of Diapason about the young French pianist Rémi Geniet. Winner at numerous international competitions, notably second prize-winner at the 2013 Queen Elisabeth International Piano Competition at the age of twenty and the youngest prize-winner of the Bonn International Beethoven Competition, Geniet has established himself as one of the most prominent pianists of his generation, performing regularly across Europe, Asia and North America, including at the Montreal Bach Festival. Among the many prestigious international festivals that invite him are Verbier, Colmar, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and La Folle Journée in Japan. Both his debut all-Bach CD, which received a Diapason d’Or of the Year in 2015, and his second release of four Beethoven sonatas, both on the Mirare label, have been unanimously praised by the critics. In 2011 he won first prize at the Prix du Piano Interlaken Classics in Bern and is a prize winner at many other competitions, including the International Horowitz Competition in Kyiv, where he won the Special Vladimir Horowitz Interpretation Prize. LMMC debut.

https://remigeniet.com/en/home

Notes

Bach’s only surviving example of program music (music to an associated story) is the Capriccio that opens today’s concert. The “departure of a beloved brother” of the title may have been for an older brother who was headed for Sweden, or it might have been for a friend, but no matter, really. Its six movements conclude with an elaborate fugue of astonishing quality for a lad not yet twenty.

Like many orchestral works of Maurice Ravel, Le Tombeau de Couperin began life as a piano composition. “Tombeau” is the French word for tomb or grave. By extension, a musical tombeau is a memorial piece or elegy. Each of its six pieces is dedicated to one of the composer’s comrades who fell in battle during World War I. Even though the music seems pleasant enough, placidly objective and coloured in pastels, these qualities really only mask the painful emotions and mood of lamentation that possessed Ravel while writing this music. When asked about the title, Ravel explained: “In reality, the homage is not so much to Couperin as to French music of the eighteenth century.”

It would of course be folly to suggest that Beethoven’s piano sonatas got “better” as their chronology increased, for scattered throughout the vast mountain range of his 32 sonatas are some of the greatest examples of the genre. Yet the last five, of which Op. 101 of 1816 is the first, seem to exist in a world of their own, like the late string quartets  ̶  a world of heightened emotional intensity and intimacy, great structural ingenuity, and increased technical range. In Op. 101, the sonata-form principle, scherzo, and fugue are all integrated to the point where Beethoven is not so much constructing to pre-conceived forms as he is thinking in pure sound.

Prokofiev’s fiery, virtuosic, free-wheeling style of piano playing, coupled with an enfant terrible approach to composition, resulted in one the most significant bodies of piano music (including nine sonatas) by any twentieth-century composer. In addition to being highly imaginative and boldly original, his music abounds in wide leaps, strong accents, energetic passage work, emphatic rhythmic figures, harsh dissonances and striking contrasts of dynamics, range and mood  ̶  all qualities found in his Fourth Piano Sonata of 1917.

Robert Markow