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CAMILLE THOMAS & JULIEN LIBEER
Our disc offers an overview of late nineteenth-century French Romanticism in
all its ambiguities. One finds in French composers a type of immediate seduction
that seems to be less of a primary concern in German music. There was a strong
process of emulation between French and German composers at the time, but the
French still felt the need to keep their own identity. Saint-Saëns is for me the great
master of the charming piece that possesses a certain ‘superficial’ beauty – in the
best sense of that adjective; it’s music that casts a spell. Franck gives us a mixture
of the French and Austro-German worlds, very different in character from Saint-
Saëns. All of this existed at the same time, which goes to show the richness of the
fin de siècle era.
Let’s get back to your two ‘central pillars’, and first of all the Franck Sonata.
What you’re playing is of course an arrangement of the original, which
was written for violin . . .
C.T.:
Yes, and it’s almost another work; the way you play it and experience it is
completely different. Unlike the violin, with its angelic, celestial sonorities, the
cello brings a much more carnal dimension to the composition as a whole, which
means it speaks to us in a very human way. The challenge is not to distort it. That’s
why we went to play it for Augustin Dumay – an artist we both admire – to get his
point of view on the piece. It was an extremely enriching exchange, which helped
me fully to accept the fact that I was performing the piece on the cello and at the
same time stimulated me to forget the instrument itself, to go beyond it, so that I
could sometimes imitate the violin.