Déodat de Sévérac remains one of those composers whose obscurity is genuinely puzzling rather than deserved. He was not a minor figure lurking at the edges of French musical life in the Belle Époque — he studied with d’Indy at the Schola Cantorum, he knew Fauré and Debussy and Magnard, and the music he produced during his short life has a regional warmth and harmonic freshness that puts it squarely in the company of the best French piano writing of the period. Yet here we are, a century after his death, grateful for a Naxos budget series to keep his name alive.
Grateful, and not apologetic about it.
Jordi Masó has made this repertoire his own over three volumes now, and what strikes you immediately — in the first pages of Le Chant de la Terre, with its modal inflections rising like heat from the Languedoc landscape — is how completely unforced the playing is. Masó doesn’t announce the music’s importance. He simply plays it, and lets Sévérac’s quietly original voice do the persuading. That’s harder than it sounds. Music this unshowy can easily collapse into the merely pleasant, and it takes a pianist with real intellectual commitment to keep the long paragraphs of Le Chant de la Terre — all twenty-two minutes of it — from losing their narrative thread. Masó never does.
The suite itself is remarkable. Sévérac drew on Virgil’s Georgics for its program, and like Virgil he understood that rural life is not a pastoral fantasy — there are hailstorms here, and the grinding labor of the seasons, before the final harvest reward. The modal coloring is sometimes almost Messiaen-like in its fragrance, though Sévérac arrived at it from a different direction entirely, filtering folk melody through a Scholist’s counterpoint rather than through ornithology and theology. The writing lies beautifully under the hands — idiomatically pianistic in the way that Fauré always is, which is to say it looks harder on paper than it sounds.
Two shorter pieces round out the first half of the disc. The “Stances à Madame de Pompadour” is a slight thing — six and a half minutes of powdered-wig nostalgia, French Baroque style filtered through early-twentieth-century sentiment — but it’s done with such deft lightness that resistance is futile. Masó’s touch in the ornamental figuration is immaculate without being fussy. The “Pippermint-Get,” named for a liqueur and its inventor, is something else again: a jaunty concert waltz that wouldn’t be out of place in a Montmartre café, with a harmonic wit that keeps it from mere salon frivolity. Sévérac had a sense of humor. It shows.
The Piano Sonata in b-flat minor is the disc’s real center of gravity, and here the questions get more interesting. D’Indy assigned it as an exercise — which tells you something about the Schola Cantorum’s demanding pedagogy and perhaps also about d’Indy’s confidence in his student. Forty minutes is a long time for an exercise. The Sonata was not published until 1990, which is one of those musicological facts that arrives like a small shock: how many performances could it have received in the intervening ninety years? Very few, one imagines. And yet it holds together. The slow movement — titled “Elegy” — carries real emotional weight, written in the shadow of the deaths of Sévérac’s father and sister, and Masó plays it with a restraint that makes the grief more present, not less. There’s a particular moment where the melody climbs up through a chain of suspensions and then quietly resolves — nothing spectacular, nothing Lisztian — and in Masó’s hands it lands with the force of something privately spoken.
The outer movements have blue-sky lyricism and a folk-song directness that occasionally nods toward the César Franck tradition d’Indy was propagating. But Sévérac was too much his own man — too attached to the particular light and smell of the Midi — to be simply a Scholist. The Sonata’s weaknesses are real: the development sections sometimes wander, and the cyclic architecture feels obligatory rather than inevitable. But the thematic material itself is strong enough to survive the structural uncertainties.
Masó’s Catalan specialization — he has recorded nine or more volumes of Catalan piano music for Naxos and its Marco Polo imprint — is not irrelevant here. Sévérac spent much of his adult life in the south, between Languedoc and the Pyrenees, and there’s a shared Mediterranean sensibility that Masó seems to feel in his bones. The playing has that quality.
Whether a catalog of competing versions would enrich the argument, I can’t honestly say — Sévérac’s piano music has been so neglected that the competition is thin. That’s precisely why this series matters. Masó has earned the right to be heard on this, and Sévérac — who should be as familiar as Fauré’s lesser piano works, at the very least — deserves the wider audience this disc might finally bring him. Recommended without reservation.
