Robert Schumann, Maurice Ravel, Béla Bartók, Dénes Várjon

De la nuit is a solo recital by the Hungarian pianist Dénes Várjon that sets three cycles of poetic piano music side by side: Schumann's Fantasiestücke op. 12, Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit and Bartók's Im Freien. Each work draws on literary or pictorial images, and each pushed piano writing into new territory in its day. Várjon plays them in chronological order, so the album crosses almost a century of music.

Várjon is well known as a chamber partner, and at ECM he had already recorded Schumann's violin sonatas with Carolin Widmann and taken part in Heinz Holliger's Romancendres. This is his second solo album for the label after Precipitando. It was recorded in April 2016 at the Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in Lugano, in collaboration with RSI Rete Due, and produced by Manfred Eicher with Markus Heiland as Tonmeister. The booklet essay is by Jürg Stenzl, who writes that all three works “far transcended the limits of their time”. It also prints the Aloysius Bertrand poems behind the Ravel, and the cover photograph is by Péter Nádas.

The Schumann opens in the muted calm of Des Abends and passes through Grillen and Fabel. At its centre is In der Nacht, the piece Schumann was proudest of according to David Nice in BBC Music Magazine. Ravel wrote Gaspard de la nuit in 1908 after Bertrand's prose poems, aiming, in his words, to express with notes what the poet says with words. Its three panels are the water sprite Ondine, the hanged man of Le Gibet and the nightmare goblin Scarbo. Bartók's five-part suite Im Freien dates from 1926. Its ghostly Klänge der Nacht leads into the driving rhythms of the closing Hetzjagd.

Reviewers singled out the way Várjon ties the three works together. Fiona Maddocks wrote in The Observer that his “brilliant technique and imaginative approach make a strong narrative out of each.” On AllMusic, James Manheim called him “something of a pianist's pianist”, found him especially effective in the Schumann and praised the recording's “quiet, shimmering resonance”. Nice called the programme “unremittingly bewitching”.

This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 2521, first released in August 2018.