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I first encountered French-born pianist Lucas Debargue on his 2019 album Scarlatti: 52 Sonatas. It was clear he shared my own love for and fascination with the prolific Italian composer’s keyboard music.
So I made a point of going to hear him play some of them at New York’s hippest small venue for classical and new music, National Sawdust. It was one of the last concerts I attended before the pandemic shut everything down in early 2020.
On February 2, 2024, Debargue will perform on a much larger stage, in a much more traditional venue: Carnegie Hall. The Cherry Orchard Festival presented his solo debut there in November 2022 and is bringing him back for another fine program of well-known and lesser-known piano music that’s sure to be enlightening on many levels.
Music as Philosophy
There’s no Scarlatti on the program this time, but I wanted to ask Debargue about him. I’m constantly finding new aspects of inventiveness – sometimes seeming almost to look forward to a modern sensibility – in his piano sonatas. Debargue’s recent solo album consists of no fewer than 52 of them.
I wanted to know what inspired him to make a close study of Scarlatti’s piano music, as Vladimir Horowitz did in the last century.
“I am absolutely addicted to Scarlatti’s music,” he told me. “I cannot imagine ever getting bored by it. My nervous system reacts extremely strongly to its expression.
“You said the thing: one can always find new details in his pieces. His corpus of sonatas is a fabulous gift in which it’s possible to constantly discover new marvels. His musical mind was going very fast and dealing masterfully with the balance between surprise and confirmation for the ears…
“He’s not only my favorite composer: he’s also my favorite philosopher!”
Restoring Emotional Impact to a Romantic Cliché
Getting back to the concert coming up, I asked Debargue about the program’s most popular work, Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 14, the “Moonlight Sonata.” Pop culture is oversaturated with this classic, especially the romantic first movement. How does he keep it fresh for himself – and for audiences?
He acknowledged that the piece has become “a romantic cliché that took away the biggest part of its emotional impact.” But “I am playing it the way I hear it,” by what he calls “inner listening.” Taking the piece at a much slower tempo than it’s usually heard, he is “confident in the score: giving time to the chords and to the space between them in the first movement is essential to prepare for the stormy finale.
“It makes even more sense when one considers that these two very contrasted movements are based on the same musical material,” he pointed out. (If you’re only familiar with the famous slow first movement, take a listen to the third. It was one of my absolute favorite pieces to play when I was studying piano.)
Creative Destruction
The program also includes a Prelude and Fugue from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, and two Chopin Ballades, all of which will be pretty familiar to classical music listeners. As with the Beethoven, Debargue continues to find freshness in this music.
The Chopin Ballades, he said, are among the first pieces he ever learned – even before he was fully capable of playing them. “The text of these pieces is engraved on the bottom of my heart, I can’t lose it,” he told me. “But I go back to them now, feeling more and more able to get rid of the assessments of the tradition of Chopin interpretation. I feel like I have to destroy this superficial ‘crust’ created by generations of interpreters to reach more genuine expression when playing them.
“I am constantly discovering things in these pieces,” Debargue said, and listeners can too.
He explained that Chopin, being a great improviser, wrote the four Ballades in an improvisatory spirit, despite their tight sense of form. “The challenge for me is to create a space for freedom and surprise in these extremely popular pieces. I believe it’s very possible. I would like listeners to rediscover totally what they thought they knew very well!”
Music as Fantasy
By contrast, many listeners won’t be familiar with two other composers on the program: the Russian Nikolai Medtner (1879–1951) and the Polish Miłosz Magin (1929–1999).
I first learned about Medtner when I heard Debargue play one of his sonatas at that National Sawdust concert three years ago.
The Piano Sonata in F minor Op. 5 is an early work, written when the composer was in his early 20s. Debargue describes it as an “extraordinary epic masterpiece,” a rarity in that it’s a Late Romantic sonata “that can substantially fill a full concert half.”
The piece, he elaborated, “is like a fantasy novel. It builds a very big arch from the first to the last notes, and has everything a music lover would dream of: depth, humor, melancholy, haunting harmonic progressions, gorgeous rhythmical energy.
“I feel privileged to be able to play it and very excited to share it with the audience. It’s one of my favorite pieces to embody.”
Magin, for his part, is actually one of Poland’s best-known 20th-century composers. Indeed he is buried next to Chopin’s tomb at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
Debargue has been championing his music for some time.
“I deeply need to include both [familiar and unfamiliar music] in my programs,” he told me. “I love to revisit popular pieces in which I think I found some interesting things; and to select, among all the lesser known music I read, the pieces I love the most to contribute [to] making the concert repertoire bigger – and tease the audience’s curiosity.”
Spoken like a true musician. Don’t miss Lucas Debargue at Carnegie Hall on Feb. 2, presented by the Cherry Orchard Festival. For tickets visit the Carnegie Hall website or the box office. His new album, Fauré: Complete Music for Solo Piano, is out March 8, 2024 on Sony Classical.
