André Mathieu was a child prodigy at the piano who evolved into one of Canada's most distinctive, original, and universal- sounding composers well before he reached the age of 20. This was followed -- as is typically the case with many prodigies -- by an adulthood marked with mental illness, alcoholism and an early death; moreover, his tragedy was further complicated by the marginalization of
Mathieu's music. There was no place for his slightly modern-impacted, unashamedly post-romantic style in an era dominated by formal procedures, contrived innovations, and the very concept of "international style." The chaos of his later years led to the loss of many
Mathieu scores, including the Piano Concerto No. 4 in E minor heard here for the first time since
Mathieu himself dropped out of concert life in 1955, performed by Canadian pianist
Alain Lefèvre with the
Tucson Symphony Orchestra under
George Hanson.
Mathieu's original score is so long gone that when
Lefèvre was handed a bag containing the lacquer disc recordings of the work from a friend of
Mathieu's after a 2005 concert,
Lefèvre thought that the discs represented a work already known.
Lefèvre --
Mathieu's greatest booster among concert artists -- wasn't even aware
Mathieu had written a fourth piano concerto, though he identified the central movement from its reworked version as the "Rhapsodie romantique," and found other bits and pieces of the work in additional recordings of
Mathieu's playing. Without a note of original manuscript to work with, musicologist
Gilles Bellemare pulled together these sources and raised a playable score, premiered in Tucson in May 2008. It is filled out with the already recorded Scènes de Ballet -- last recorded by
Philippe Entremont in the late '70s -- in a stunning new recording and another first, the Quatre Chansons pour choeur et orchestre (1946-1957) from an edition prepared by
Bellemare in 2005. This Analekta release, André Mathieu: Concerto No. 4, was recorded at the first revival of the work in concert, and was released in record time, before the end of the year in which the concert itself was presented. Such haste was not without some sense of purpose, as there are big plans for observance of what would have been
Mathieu's 80th birth year, including a biography of and feature film based on
Mathieu's tumultuous life.