Sévérac Piano Works – Rignol

Something in the light of the Pyrénées-Orientales gets into a piano the way it never quite does into an orchestra score, and Déodat de Sévérac understood this better than almost anyone of his generation. Debussy famously said the man’s music “smells good” — a backhanded compliment if there ever was one, but not wrong. There’s thyme and salt air in this music, along with a heavy dose of Catalan sun that never burns, only warms.

François-Michel Rignol, new to disc on the venerable French label Solstice, clearly knows this terrain — not just geographically but temperamentally. You sense in the very first bars of Cerdaña that he isn’t approaching this as exotic tourism. The five Cinq Etudes Pittoresques that make up that suite unfold with an unforced naturalness; rubato breathes rather than lurches, and voicing inside the thicker chordal writing (Sévérac loved to stack sonorities the way Albéniz did, though with a softer, more diffuse pedal-haze) never turns to sludge. “En Tartane,” with its lazy jolting rhythm evoking a mule-cart along dusty roads, has just the right hint of hesitation — not too regular, not too free.

Sévérac remains a name most concertgoers will politely nod at without quite placing. He studied with d’Indy and Magnard at the Schola Cantorum, absorbed the Franckist contrapuntal rigor there, and then more or less walked away from Paris altogether, decamping to the south to write music soaked in regional identity rather than metropolitan ambition. He died young, in 1921, from an infection following a fall — a loss that still feels premature given how his voice was deepening in the final decade.

The competition on disc is not thin. Aldo Ciccolini’s pioneering traversal for EMI, still the benchmark for many collectors despite its vintage analog patina, has an authority that comes from having practically invented the discography of this repertoire. Jordi Masó’s three-volume Naxos cycle — genial, idiomatic, beautifully engineered — remains probably the best single modern recommendation for anyone wanting the composer whole and inexpensively. Billy Eidi and Albert Attenelle each made their own cases in the same year, oddly enough, and Jean-Joël Barbier’s 1980s Accord recordings, now reissued, have their own perfumed charm. Isabelle Le Goux deserves mention for album the otherwise unavailable Six Petites Pièces, engineering warts and all.

Rignol doesn’t unseat any of these, but he doesn’t need to — there’s room in this small discography for another persuasive voice. Where he especially scores is in “Baigneuses au Soleil,” subtitled a souvenir of Banyuls-sur-Mer: shimmering figuration in the right hand suggesting sun on water, handled here with a lightness of touch that avoids the impressionistic mush lesser pianists fall into. It’s gorgeous, unhurried, never showy.

“Sous les Lauriers Roses,” the carnival-evening piece from 1919, gets a interpretation of real character — the harmonic writing here is more adventurous, more chromatically unstable than the earlier works, and Rignol leans into its unease without overplaying it. There’s an almost Fauré-like ambiguity in the part-writing, and a whiff of Satie’s deadpan in the rhythmic stubbornness of certain passages. Rignol clearly hears these kinships without ever letting Sévérac dissolve into pastiche of his contemporaries. That’s the trick of this composer — he’s always about to sound like someone else, and never quite does.

My one real complaint: the treatment of En Vacances. Rignol gives us only four of the eight pieces from the first book, nothing from the second, with no obvious rationale offered for the cuts — and there was surely room on the disc for more, given the generous overall timing. It’s not a fatal flaw, but it’s a frustrating one, since the omitted pieces are hardly makeweights.

The Rignol transcription of “Ma Poupée Chérie,” a tiny thing barely over three minutes, closes the program almost as an afterthought — sweetly done, if slight.

Piano sound is warm, close but not claustrophobic, with a bit of room ambience that suits this repertoire’s need to breathe. Anyone starting fresh with Sévérac could do far worse than begin here, though Masó remains the safer bet for completists and Ciccolini for those who want the historical imprimatur. Rignol earns his place in the catalog on the strength of real sympathy for the material — not filler, not tourism, the real thing.