Schmitt Piano Duets – Invencia Piano Duo

Somewhere around 1905, Florent Schmitt seems to have decided that limitation was the surest path to freedom. He picked five notes — just five — and built an entire suite on them, then did it again a couple of years later, as if the first experiment hadn’t sufficiently proven his point. The point being, apparently, that a composer with real ears can spin nearly anything out of nearly nothing. Stravinsky liked to say something similar about scales.

This is the second installment of what the husband-and-wife team Andrey Kasparov and Oksana Lutsyshyn are calling their complete traversal of Schmitt’s four-hand and two-piano output — a project of real value, since this repertoire has spent most of the last century gathering dust in Parisian libraries while Schmitt’s reputation curdled into a footnote. He was, lest we forget, once spoken of alongside Debussy and Ravel; Stravinsky dedicated the Rite’s ballet score to him and Roussel counted him a peer. Then came the postwar reassessment, the whiff of wartime politics that clung to his name, and — silence. The CD era did what French musicology couldn’t quite manage on its own: it brought him back, piecemeal.

Sur cinq notes, op. 34, is the more purely delightful of the pair. Schmitt takes his self-imposed cell of five pitches and refuses to let it feel like a cage. There’s a “Mélodie” that leans toward Fauré with real tenderness, not pastiche — you can hear Schmitt’s genuine debt to his teacher rather than some knowing wink at him. The “Barcarolle” rocks with a Chopinesque swell but the harmony keeps sliding somewhere Chopin never went. And the “Pastorale,” dedicated in spirit if not in name to his friend Ravel, has that same cool, poised eroticism Ravel could conjure out of parallel fourths. It ends — and this is the movement that stays with you — in a “Farandole” that whips itself into something almost feral, the five-note kernel hammered out in shifting rhythmic cells until it sounds like a distant cousin of the Salome ballet music Schmitt would write not long after. That exoticist streak, the one that made La Tragédie de Salomé such a sensation in 1907, is already fully formed here in miniature.

The Huit courtes pièces, op. 41, is cooler, more didactic — Schmitt clearly had students or amateurs in mind, or at least the market for teaching pieces that every French composer of the period tried to service. But “didactic” undersells it. The “Menuet” and “Virelai” gesture toward the neoclassicism that wouldn’t fully crystallize until Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin a decade later; the “Sérénade” has a wry, spare textural wit that points straight at Les Six, though Schmitt would never have wanted the association. There’s a “Boléro” that pointedly refuses to sound like the one everybody thinks of — this is 1907, decades before Ravel claimed the title, so if anyone was anticipating whom, it’s Schmitt anticipating himself. Small pieces, unpretentious, but stitched with real craft.

Reflets d’Allemagne is the odd one out, both because it isn’t built on the five-note conceit and because it’s had two prior recordings — including a genuinely lovely one from Leslie De’Ath and Anya Alexeyev, whose touch brought out a Schumannesque warmth in these urban portraits. Eight German and Austrian cities, rendered in sound: Lübeck arrives shrouded and bell-haunted, Dresden glitters with a kind of nervous Baroque splendor filtered through post-Wagnerian harmony. It’s the biggest and most architecturally ambitious piece on the disc — twenty-three minutes against sixteen and nineteen for its companions — and you can hear Schmitt working harder at large-scale coherence than at charm. That’s also its weakness. The five-note suites have a puckish, improvisatory quality that Reflets, for all its sophistication, never quite matches. Big cathedrals are impressive. They’re not always where you want to linger.

Kasparov and Lutsyshyn play this music with a precision that borders on the forensic — every inner voice audible, every canonic entry (and Schmitt loved to bury one voice under another) placed exactly where the ear can find it if it goes looking. Some listeners may want a little more perfume, a touch more rubato in the “Barcarolle,” more sway in the waltz-inflected numbers. I found myself occasionally missing a sense of two performers breathing as one body rather than two exceptionally well-drilled minds occupying one bench. But the engineering, done in the recital hall at Old Dominion University, is bright and immediate — you hear hammers, pedal changes, the whole mechanical apparatus of piano-four-hands playing, which suits music this contrapuntally busy.

Is this indispensable listening? Not in the way Ravel’s or Debussy’s four-hand music is indispensable. But it’s fascinating, historically vital, and performed here with a clarity that never blurs Schmitt’s often thorny part-writing into mush. Four volumes in, this project deserves to be followed through to the end — and Schmitt, dead these sixty-odd years and still climbing back toward the light, deserves the attention.