Schmitt Piano Duets – Invencia Piano Duo

Florent Schmitt won the Prix de Rome in 1900, which tells you something about his early gifts and rather more about how little such prizes ultimately determine a composer’s posthumous fate. He outlived Debussy by forty years, outlived Ravel by twenty, and spent those final decades watching the century turn against him in ways he could not quite have anticipated. The neglect feels almost willful at this point. Almost punitive.

Which makes this new disc from the Invencia Piano Duo — two ODU faculty members, Andrey Kasparov and Oksana Lutsyshyn, both born in the former Soviet sphere and both playing with the kind of collaborative intimacy that comes from years of shared rehearsal — something genuinely welcome. Grand Piano has set them to work on the complete original music for piano four-hands and two-piano duo, apparently a body of work that rivals Schubert’s in sheer volume. That claim deserves a raised eyebrow, but not too skeptical a one.

The Three Rhapsodies for two pianos, op. 53, are the most familiar pieces here — half a dozen recordings exist, maybe more — and so the Invencia’s reading invites comparison. What they bring is a kind of refined athleticism. The “Française” sparkles without clatter; the fingerwork is clean, the inner voices audible, the whole thing pleasingly unbuttoned. The “Polonaise” has swagger but not bombast, and Kasparov and Lutsyshyn resist any temptation toward the lugubrious, which is exactly right — there is nothing melancholic about this music, whatever the liner notes suggest. And the “Viennoise” — here is where things get genuinely interesting.

Because the “Viennoise” predates La Valse by the better part of two decades, and anyone who knows Ravel’s masterpiece will hear the resemblance in reverse, as it were. The nervous waltz energy, the harmonic shimmer threatening to curdle, the sense of a social form being gently — then not so gently — subverted. Schmitt got there first. History gave Ravel the credit.

The Rhapsodie Parisienne makes the point even more sharply. It has that same teetering quality, that same vertigo in triple time. One reviewer has compared it to La Valse, apparently without noticing that Schmitt wrote it around 1900 and Ravel’s work came twenty years later. The direction of influence runs the other way. This isn’t a footnote — it’s a genuine reorientation of how we hear both composers.

The Seven Pieces, op. 15, are a different matter entirely. Earlier, more exploratory, less concerned with impressing anyone. They sprawl a little. Some movements feel like sketches that got away from their composer, which is not necessarily a criticism — there’s an appealing rawness to them, a sense of a young man testing his harmonic language against whatever the room will bear. Kasparov and Lutsyshyn play them with evident affection, though not without a certain scholarly gravity that occasionally slows the pulse when lightness might serve better.

One small act of integrity deserves mention: Schmitt left instructions that an early duet, Marche Spectrale, not be published, and the Invencia have honored that wish. In an era when posthumous publication of everything a composer ever scrawled on a napkin is treated as a form of respect, this restraint is quietly admirable.

The recorded sound is clean and well-balanced between the instruments — no small achievement in two-piano disc, where the temptation is to let one instrument dominate the soundstage. Grand Piano has done right by these performers and by this repertoire.

The case for Schmitt does not rest on special pleading. It rests on the music itself, which is sophisticated, inventive, and — in the best moments here — simply luminous. This disc makes that case persuasively. Three more volumes to go.