Paray Piano Works Vol 2 – Krivokochenko and Reyes

Somewhere in the vast unglamorous middle of French musical history there is a filing cabinet marked “conductors who also composed,” and Paul Paray sits in it, gathering dust next to Charles Munch’s occasional pieces and Pierre Monteux’s student exercises. Which is a shame, because on the evidence of this disc — the second installment in Ciar Classics’ quietly valuable excavation — Paray the composer deserves better than a footnote to Paray the Detroit Symphony’s beloved music director, that dapper septuagenarian who gave Michigan audiences Franck and Ravel with such Gallic polish in the 1950s and ‘60s.

The music here comes almost entirely from before the baton took over his life. Reflets Romantiques, the nine-piece set opening the program, was written in 1912 though Jobert didn’t get around to publishing it until a decade later — a gap that tells you something about how thoroughly Paray’s compositional ambitions got shelved once the podium beckoned. The pieces themselves inhabit that particular Parisian sound-world of the years just before the war changed everything: not quite Debussy, nowhere near as radical, but soaked in the same harmonic perfume. “Avec esprit et charme” opens things with a coquettish little dance, all raised eyebrows and sly rubato, and Katia Krivokochenko plays it exactly as marked — with wit, with charm, and without the arch overselling that lesser pianists bring to salon miniatures like this.

Krivokochenko is new to me, a Franco-Russian pianist whose fingerwork has the kind of unforced clarity you associate with the best products of French pedagogy — clean pedaling, a real legato line, no smearing. She’s particularly good in “Ardemment,” the second piece, where the mood turns suddenly serious and the music asks for something closer to Fauré’s inwardness than the salon glitter that surrounds it. Some pianists would push too hard here. She doesn’t.

The Scherzetto, tucked in as the fifth piece, actually predates the rest of the set by nearly a decade — 1903, when Paray would have been a teenager at the Conservatoire, already showing the mercurial temperament that would later serve him so well in Ravel. It’s a slippery, fickle little thing, never settling into one mood for more than a phrase or two, and Krivokochenko catches its evasiveness nicely. By contrast the Impromptu — at over eight minutes, easily the largest canvas in the set — sprawls a bit; Paray’s formal control here is looser than his invention, and I found my attention wandering exactly where a stronger structural hand might have held it. “Sur la Mer” redeems things with some genuinely gleaming pianism, the kind of shimmering figuration Ravel would have recognized as a compliment, and “Vertige” closes in a blaze of prestidigitation that Krivokochenko dispatches with real flair — fingers like quicksilver, no smudging even at tempo.

The three Impressions, also from 1912, are more uneven. “Nostalgie” has genuine wistfulness — a backward glance, tinged with something like regret, beautifully weighted by Krivokochenko’s voicing of the inner lines. “Éclaircie,” I’m sorry to say, just sits there; even this persuasive advocate can’t quite make a case for music that seems to have arrived without an idea. “Primesaut” recovers the ground with a swirling, intoxicated waltz that owes an obvious debt to Chabrier — not a bad model to owe a debt to.

More interesting, structurally, is the 1913 triptych Prélude, Allegro, Scherzo. Here Paray reaches for something with more architectural weight — the outer sections of the Allegro have a toccata’s percussive drive, framing a central episode of real tenderness, and the whole thing hangs together in a way the earlier miniatures don’t quite manage. The Scherzo, described in the booklet notes (accurately, for once) as wearing “the guise of Pulcinella,” has exactly that kind of knowing, commedia-dell’arte lightness — Stravinsky was still five years off, but you can hear why that particular ballet, when it came, wouldn’t have surprised a French performer of this generation.

The late outlier is the Prélude in E flat minor from 1930 — solemn, almost funereal, a different composer entirely from the young man of 1912. One wonders what happened in the intervening years; Paray had by then largely abandoned composition for conducting, and this piece feels like a door quietly closing.

For the two collaborative works, Krivokochenko is joined by Eliane Reyes, who anchored volume one of this series and here takes the second chair with unfussy sympathy. The four-hand waltz from 1916 is a trifle, charmingly so — nobody would mistake it for major Paray, but it’s the kind of thing French households used to play after dinner, and it wears its slightness well. Far more substantial is the Fantasie for two pianos, dating from 1906–09 and receiving, remarkably, its world premiere disc here. Composed during Paray’s student years at the Conservatoire — it began life, tellingly, as a work for piano and orchestra, which explains its rather grand rhetorical gestures — it runs past thirteen minutes and has real ambition, oscillating between Franckian solemnity and a brighter, more Ravelian glitter. The two pianists balance each other with real ensemble instinct; nothing here sounds like two soloists taking turns, which is the