Lucas Debargue

Lucas Debargue, piano

UKARIA

Sunday June 7, 2025

Although the very beginning is a very good place to start, it was easier to understand this concert by starting from the end. Not quite the very end, which was an improvised solo encore in a jazz style, or at least jazz seen from a classical perspective. Preceding that was a question-and-answer session with French pianist Lucas Debargue. He’s thirty-five years old and first came to public attention when he received 4^th prize at the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 2015. Among his many recordings are a host of Scarlatti sonatas and the complete piano works of Gabriel Fauré.

In response to questions from the audience, he talked about his approach to music and piano playing. Briefly paraphrased, he believes that too much piano teaching emphasises technique instead of imagination and that many hours are wasted practising to achieve note-perfect performance, when that time could be devoted to developing imaginative responses to the score. Reading books, going to the theatre, looking at art and many other activities that enrich musicians’ lives and imaginations are more valuable than spending long, lonely hours trying to reach technical perfection.

It’s difficult to argue with Debargue’s point of view. No doubt he enjoys being an iconoclast, but it’s not a radical concept. I recall Claudio Arrau saying something very similar fifty years ago, and I am certain that many other fine musicians, past and present, would agree with it. Nonetheless, he makes a fair point about the present day, when it is possible for a young musician to listen online to recorded performances that are always ‘perfect’ and attempt to emulate them. Combine that with the intensely competitive nature of the classical music world and the result is the ‘convergent evolution’ we hear in many performances.

Debargue favours risk taking and his performances are quasi-improvisatory. He doesn’t make things up, but reimagines the music each time he plays. Again, this is not new but rather a return to an older tradition which was central to the very individualistic approach to performance of the 19^th century. It survived to some extent into the 20^th century. (Mme. Vera Maurina-Press, an old-school Russian piano teacher, told her student Morton Feldman in the 1940s “every performance should be like an improvisation”.)

Debargue’s explanation shed some light post facto on what we had been listening to. He began with another improvisation in a florid jazz-adjacent style, followed by Fauré’s Thème et Variations and, without a break, Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit. This is a demanding way to start a concert. Fauré was quite lovely and lyrical for the most part, though it could have been given more space to breathe. For Debargue every performance is an adventure and he doesn’t know where it’s going until he plays it. It’s a great concept, but sometimes it results, at least temporarily, in a loss of direction while he works out where he is going next.

Debargue’s idiosyncratic style emerged more strongly in Gaspard de la nuit, which had some novel effects achieved through pedalling, and unexpected note-stopping with his finger on a string in Scarbo. In spite of his subsequent remarks about over-emphasis on technique, Debargue has technique to burn and is not afraid to show it. Occasionally he seemed to lose his way momentarily but quickly found it again. The infernal flavours of weirdness and grotesquerie in Aloysius Bertrand’s collection of poems of the same name were strong throughout the performance. Bertrand’s book starts with a discussion between the author and an old man (who later turns out to be the devil) about the role of sentiment and idea in Art, which in retrospect was relevant to the post-concert discussion. Debargue seems to be more on the side of ideas than sentiment.

(After the concert I listened to Vlado Perlemuter’s last recording of Gaspard, made when he was 89. His modest but profound playing made an interesting and illuminating contrast to the one I had just heard.)

Ravel the classicist came to the fore in the beautiful Sonatine, which Debargue played with elegance and restraint except perhaps for the third movement, which might have been slightly overcooked. Interesting pedalling distinguished Jeux d’eaux; at the beginning it seemed we were not merely looking at water in the playful fountains but actually submerged in the water.

The concert ended with a series of virtuosic variations written by Debargue on George Gershwin’s Summertime, appropriate considering that Gershwin wanted composition lessons with Ravel, who politely declined. It was another throwback to the 19^th century, when travelling virtuosi were expected to play their own variations or transcriptions of popular songs and arias from opera. Churned out in their hundreds, they have disappeared from the repertoire except for those by Liszt and very occasionally someone else. Inherently ephemeral and generally not very good music, they were great crowd pleasers. Debargue’s variations featured many different musical styles from classical to pop; the bossa nova variation was possibly the best. It was all good fun, but it would be a stretch to call it more than that.