Musiques Sur L’eau

About

By turns limpid and clear, tempestuous and smooth as a mirror, water nourishes the musical imagination and here serves as a guiding thread for pianist Célia Oneto Bensaid in an all-female programme spanning more than a century and a half of French piano music. Virtuosic or exalted, ironic or melancholic, these aquatic wanderings offer an opportunity to (re)discover women composers overlooked by a posterity with too masculine a bias. Rita Strohl’s Musiques sur l’eau celebrates communion with “the Ocean beside which [she] first saw the light of day,” as do the Impressions de mer by Marcelle de Manziarly, a pupil of Nadia Boulanger. The waves become more mischievous in Jeanne Leleu’s En gondole, Marie Jaëll’s Les Jours pluvieux and Fernande Decruck’s L’Aquarium, while Camille Pépin plays with the luminous games performed by the water of the clouds. As Célia Oneto Bensaid notes, all these works display “a predilection for the whole-tone scale.”