There are flaws in the execution of this program, but no matter -- it's a rare recording that offers not just one but two original ideas. The first is that there's an energy that's characteristic of American music, whether it comes from the crowd-pleasing crossover sphere of Gershwin and Morton Gould or from the experimentalist quarters of Cage and Nancarrow. That shouldn't have been an earth-shattering revelation, but when was the last time you saw all four of those composers -- plus Amy Beach, Scott Joplin, Copland, MacDowell, Bernstein, Barber, and Louis Moreau Gottschalk -- on the same disc? Perhaps it took a French performer to realize that musical populism and the twentieth century avant-garde had a lot in common; Americans are too much at each other's throats, in classical music as in other fields, to get it. Michel Legrand's second insight here is that French influence is present in a much wider variety of music than is generally supposed. It is startling to see essentially French concepts run through the disc, beginning with the Parisian-trained Gottschalk and his very French musical confrontations with the cultural Other, and running up through MacDowell, who studied in Paris, and the heavily French-influenced Aaron Copland. The segue between the final two tracks, from Gottschalk's Le Banjo to Cage's Bacchanale for prepared piano, relates two pieces that are conventionally thought of as distant from one another, but here the sequence seems utterly natural. The disc doesn't get into the creative relationship between Cage and Boulez that came along in the middle of the century, but anyone studying that period would do well to get hold of this disc and internalize its contents.
Certainly problems accompany this step forward. The same liner notes that are full of daring and insightful observations make the bizarre claim that the banjo is an ancestor of the modern guitar. Legrand swings the rhythms of the Maple Leaf Rag of Joplin, despite firm, explicit instructions in the score that the sixteenth notes in its right-hand part should be played evenly. And in general, this famous composer of film music, the creator of the immortal Les parapluies de Cherbourg, is not quite up to the athletic demands of some of the music here, such as the Lisztian octaves in the two Gottschalk works included. Nevertheless, there are few recordings that can singlehandedly make one hear a great deal of music in a whole new way. The disc was recorded and released in France in 1994; its rerelease is most welcome.
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