This album is a magical realm of sound colours. With the two Frenchmen Francois Couperin and Olivier Messiaen, Louisa Imorde has chosen composers for whom the very qualities of colour in music were important. One of the most exciting piano albums of recent months.
On her previous albums, the young German pianist Luisa Imorde has already allowed different musical personalities to enter into an exciting dialogue.
On her new album, she now brings together two composers from France who come from different eras, are very contrasting and yet have interesting things in common: François Couperin (1668-1733) and Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992).
Just as the great architect Le Corbusier knew how to bring contrasting colours into perfect harmony with his "Polychromie Architecturale", a similar effect is revealed on the present album. Olivier Messiaen's "Huit Préludes" from 1928/29 form the starting point for Luisa Imorde's compilation. The synaesthete Messiaen organised his harmonic system in special modes, to each of which he assigned precise colours, beginning with orange-violet and ending with the final colourful-spiritual appearance of light.
The artist discovered exciting parallels to this in the work of François Couperin, the court harpsichordist of the Sun King Louis XIV. He, too, composed a cycle of eight preludes and also wrote the definition of a prelude, valid until Messiaen's time, as "a free composition in which the imagination gives way to all its ideas". Luisa Imorde juxtaposes each of these preludes with a character piece by the Baroque master harpsichordist in the same key. With Couperin's programmatic titles, she builds subtle connections to Messiaen's compositions. For her recordings, Luisa Imorde chose a modern Bösendorfer grand piano, which brings out the richness of the music's colours from full depth to crystalline treble.
"Luisa Imorde combines a mature playing technique with an irrepressible passion for the piece and the instrument to create a sound experience that ignites the mind and inflames the heart", - the Süddeutsche Zeitung said about the pianist's piano playing. She played competitions and won prizes, but Luisa Imorde is much more interested in juxtaposing the works of different composers with the declared aim of making them audible to the audience in a novel way and revealing relationships that seemed to be hidden.
Quellen: © Berlin Classics
Instrument: Bösendorfer 280VC