A sensitive cosmopolitan

The melancholy melody of the opening prelude on this CD is almost like a minimalist film score. A waltz hints at Chopin, but is also imbued with a completely different, idiosyncratic color. The later impressionistic play of colors in Deux estampes permeated by a hitherto hardly known, very individual personal style ...

During his studies in the USA, Swiss pianist Christian Erny came across the oeuvre of Arthur Lourié, whose name sounds as "un-Russian" as his music. Is this precisely why Lourié, who was born in what is now Belarus in 1891, lived for a long time in Paris and later in the USA, where he died in 1966, has largely disappeared into obscurity?

On his second solo CD, Christian Erny's playing takes on this world of sound and thought in the most unagitated way possible. Erny knows how to subtly mix the registers and colors as if they were human voices. This is no coincidence, as Erny is very ambitious as the director of his Zurich Chamber Singers and, by his own admission, this brings with it many synergy effects for the pianistic interpretation.

Thus, certain neoclassical traits unfold in Lourié's music in an emphatically weightless and detailed manner, as well as a meditative Intermezzo and later a worn Nocturno touch deeply. But Lourié and his committed contemporary interpreter can also do things quite differently: a furious Gigue becomes an unleashed rhythm and sound study that is much more reminiscent of a rebellious Stravinsky and not at all of baroque models. The ambiguity of Lourié's circumstances is symbolized by a LullabyA lullaby: although still deeply rooted in Romanticism, a second writing unmistakably anticipates the beginning of modernism.