Jean-Paul Gasparian - A Night at the Opera Jean-Paul Gasparian

For his third album on naïve, Jean-Paul Gasparian sets the scene by borrowing the title from one of the most memorable and delightfully unrestrained films by the Marx Brothers, released in 1935. There is no risk of altering or slapstick here, however, so dazzling is the French pianist’s command of technique at every turn. The keyboard sparkles with flashes of brilliance, fingers taking flight like mischievous imps that will resonate in the listener’s imagination.

This recital is built around paraphrases and transcriptions that Franz Liszt fashioned from themes and motifs by Verdi (Rigoletto, Don Carlos, Aida, Il trovatore), Bellini (Norma) and Wagner (Tannhäuser, Tristan und Isolde). By engaging with these grand Lisztian recreations, alongside the brief and serene Casta diva as reimagined by Sigismond Thalberg, Jean-Paul Gasparian - only in his thirties - returns to the historical sources of his own tempestuous, radiant style, which is at once impassioned and deeply romantic, and in which brilliance and poetic depth are seamlessly interwoven.

In the grandiose Miserere du “Trovatore” - a turning point in the middle of the recital - the French pianist unveils the full range of the piano’s dark, tragic sonorities, which are pushed even further in Réminiscences de “Norma”, a work of extraordinary dramatic power and another unmistakable triumph in Franz Liszt’s art of paraphrase.

Jean-Paul Gasparian carries with unwavering composure these magnificent frescoes, works that in the nineteenth century helped to establish the triumphal figure of the ‘pianist king’.

For Franz Liszt, the paraphrase was an act of love for the public - opera being the quintessential popular art form - and for the composers, whose creative genius he championed and then exalted through the art of improvisation. From 1829 (Grande fantaisie sur “La Fiancée”, after Daniel Auber) to 1882 (Réminiscences de Boccanegra), the Hungarian Romantic engaged with some thirty composers, producing a catalogue of around sixty works in which Bellini, Donizetti, Meyerbeer, Mozart, Verdi (nine times) and of course Wagner (fourteen times) predominate, through which he inaugurated a new era of piano writing.