Tristan Generation – Juliette Journaux

Following Wanderer Without Words (Alpha 984), which demonstrated her talents as a transcriber and pianist – “we applaud both the skill of the composition and the performance, which alternates between subtle gestures and flashes of passion”, wrote Diapason – Juliette Journaux now embarks on “a declaration of love for German post-Romanticism”, born at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, which dares to marry “the sublime and the trivial, beauty and ugliness, ecstasy and anguish, the divine and the carnal.”

Composers are gradually breaking free from classical structures, the boundaries of tonality are being pushed back, and the system of organising sounds around a stable central pole of attraction is being overturned: “Post-Romanticism muddies the clear waters,” continues the French pianist. These tensions are embodied in a particularly striking manner in a work whose shockwaves reverberated throughout the late 19th century: Tristan und Isolde, premiered on 10 June 1865.

The ‘Wagner case’ would captivate the musical world for decades, and young Viennese composers would follow in the master’s footsteps: Wolf, Zemlinsky, Schoenberg, Schreker, Braunfels and Korngold feature on the programme of this recital, comprising numerous transcriptions by the pianist, which sheds a captivating light on this historic turning point.