Cahuzac Clarinet Works – Guy Dangain

Some names live only in the shadow of their students. Louis Cahuzac is not quite one of those — he made his own recordings, wrote his own treatise, cut a distinguished figure at the Paris Opéra and later the Opéra-Comique — but his real afterlife has been through the players he touched. Guy Dangain touched him back. He studied with the old man, sat under his baton in the orchestra pit, absorbed whatever cannot be written down in a fingering chart. That lineage matters here, or at least Phaia wants us to think it does, reissuing this 2003 session as a kind of filial document.

Does it earn the claim? Mostly, yes.

Cahuzac’s own music — and there is more of it than most clarinetists ever get around to programming — draws on the sun-warmed idioms of Languedoc and the Cévennes, folk melody filtered through a performer who spent his career inside opera orchestras and knew exactly how far a clarinet’s cantabile could stretch before it snapped into artifice. The Fantaisie sur un vieil air champêtre unfolds in three unhurried panels, and Dangain’s playing here has an unforced grayness to it — not gray as in dull, but gray as in Cévennes stone, weathered and true to its source rather than polished up for the concert hall. His tone sits leaner than you might expect, narrower in the middle register than, say, Philippe Cuper’s on the rival Clarinet Classics disc devoted entirely to Cahuzac. Where Cuper blooms and postures a little — not unpleasantly — Dangain simply speaks. Plainer diction, but not thinner feeling.

The Pastorale cévenole breathes wide open fifths and modal turns that recall Déodat de Séverac more than anyone in Paris proper; Dangain lets the rustic bagpipe drone implicit in the writing come through without italicizing it. Cantilène, by contrast, is pure vocal writing transferred to reed and keywork, and it’s here his breath control tells: no audible snatching, no seams. Whoever engineered this session — the acoustic is dry, close, a touch unglamorous — did him a favor, actually, because you hear every seam that isn’t there.

Variations sur un air Pays d’Oc closes the Cahuzac group and is the finest thing on the disc, eight minutes of increasingly virtuosic decoration on a folk tune that never loses its rural accent no matter how many roulades pile up around it. Dangain’s articulation in the faster variations has real snap — tongue and fingers locked together the way only decades of orchestral discipline can produce.

Then the recital opens outward, and this is where things get more interesting than a straight all-Cahuzac program would have been. Pierné’s Canzonetta, op. 19, is a bonbon, three minutes of salon charm dating from 1888, and Dangain tosses it off without fuss. Giamperi’s Il Carnevale di Venezia is the opposite: a circus act, variations on the old tune bristling with double-tonguing and register leaps that exist purely to show off, and Dangain — pushing eighty at the time of this album, worth remembering — dispatches it with a technical security that would embarrass players half his age. Not flashy. Just clean.

Jeanjean’s two pieces are the real discovery for anyone who doesn’t already know this repertoire. Clair matin has a Fauré-ish restraint to its lyricism; Arabesques lets the Gallic wrist loosen up considerably, all filigree and light. Dangain’s own Ballade à Ophélie, tucked in among these historical curiosities, is a graceful, slightly wistful piece that doesn’t embarrass its neighbors — no small compliment, that.

The Rimsky-Korsakov transcription from Le Coq d’Or closes things with a confident flourish, virtuosity worn lightly rather than brandished.

Is this indispensable next to the Cuper disc? Not exactly — the two are complementary rather than competitive, Cuper more sensuous and outward-directed, Dangain drier, more inward, closer perhaps to what Cahuzac himself actually sounded like on his own surviving 78s, which were never plush recordings to begin with. Misaki Baba’s piano is attentive throughout, never merely accompanying. For anyone building a serious clarinet library, or anyone who cares where the French school actually came from before it got smoothed out by conservatory competition polish, this belongs on the shelf. Not a luxury item. A document, and a good one.