Sony’s double album celebrating the music of the belle époque (1871-1914) provides a welcome antidote to the age of austerity and our own troubled times, a golden period brought to an abrupt end by the First World War. Here you could live ‘convivially or alone, wastefully or frugally, luxuriously or à la bohème’ (Stefan Zweig). And while it is hard to think of the formidable and often severe Nadia Boulanger as a part of such extravagance and frivolity, Hahn (who became Proust’s lover) and Fauré (whose affairs were the gossip of the Paris salons) entered into the spirit of things.

Hahn’s Piano Concerto (1914) is very much for those who enjoy music that is easy on the ear, happy to delight in charm and sparkle and, for the virtuoso-minded, cascades of notes. A not-so-distant relative of Saint-Saëns’s piano concertos (though a lesser work), its second-movement ‘Danse’ and the hee-hawing start to the concluding ‘Rêverie, Toccata et Finale’ cry out for the sort of joie de vivre heard in Magda Tagliaferro’s 1934 recording, a scintillating contrast to Youn’s more respectable response. Ultimately, this work requires greater aplomb if it is not to degenerate into chandelier music. Youn’s way with Fauré’s Ballade is, again, more dutiful than illuminating. There is too little evocation of music recalling halcyon, half-remembered summer days and bird-haunted forests, memories more engagingly evoked in recordings by Louis Lortie and Kathryn Stott. The later Fantaisie, Op 111, takes you far away from such Romanticism, and its jolting second subject will come as a surprise to those still wedded to the notion of Fauré as ‘the purest embodiment of moderation’ (Émile Vuillermoz). Recorded with greater conviction by Alicia de Larrocha, I doubt if Youn’s more neutral performance will win new friends for music dismissed as difficult and obscure. (Cortot, although the Fantaisie’s dedicatee, was not among its admirers.)

Youn is better suited to the overall sobriety of Nadia Boulanger’s Fantaisie variée (1912), first performed by Raul Pugno, with whom Boulanger enjoyed both a personal and professional relationship. This leaves me with Youn’s arrangements of two songs by Hahn and one by Fauré, a tribute to his affection for both composers (expressed in the accompanying notes). Yet I could, again, have wished for a greater sense of lyricism, a more widely varied sonority and texture and a vocal line soaring above the pianist. Memories of Gérard Souzay’s elegance in Hahn’s ‘L’heure exquise’ and Janet Baker’s burning intensity in the line ‘je quittais la terre’ from ‘Après un rêve’ remain among my indelible musical memories. Sony’s sound is close, militating against a necessary sense of flow.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of International Piano. Never miss an issue – subscribe today