Reynaldo Hahn has always been celebrated for his songs but his chamber music was neglected until the 21st century. The Tchalik family of musicians is now the first ensemble to record all his major chamber music with strings and piano. Some pieces on this second volume have never previously been recorded, including the unfinished piano trio.
KBACH's Michael Keelan talked with Louise and Marc Tchalik.
Details: alkonostclassic.com
Michael Keelan: This is KBACH’s First Take, and I'm Michael Keelan. I'm talking with two members of the Tchalik Quartet, Louise, a violinist, and Marc, the cellist, about their new album of Reynaldo Hahn's chamber music. It's volume two, and Hahn is a composer famous for his songs, but the instrumental music has only been revived in the last generation or so. How did you come to know about Hahn and his instrumental music?
Louise Tchalik: Oh, so we actually met Reynaldo Hahn through Proust. Of course, Reynaldo Hahn, since he was a very, very close friend to Marcel Proust, he had some influence over Proust and so this is very connected. And Gabriel was really fond of Marcel Proust and reading the À la recherche du temps perdu.
Michael: Referring to your brother Gabriel, the other violinist in the quartet, reading Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time.
Louise Tchalik: And that's how he discovered Reynaldo Hahn and his music and also he started to play "La Romance" for violin and piano at this time, so it was like maybe 15 years ago. So this is the first piece we heard for strings actually and not for voice. And then maybe Marc wants to explain about the quintet.
Marc Tchalik: When we started to play really seriously together as we are all siblings, we decided that we wanted to try to play all together and because we could play piano quintet as we have all the instruments for this. And we were wondering what to start with, which piece. I was really young at this time, I think I was around 12 or 13 years ago—years old. And we thought that maybe it would be a good idea not to start with all the great masterpieces for quintet like Schumann's quintet or Brahms' quintet. And we thought maybe it's easier to start with Reynaldo Hahn's quintet and I think it was a mistake because actually this quintet is really hard to put together but it's really great, wonderful piece, it's a real chef-d'œuvre.
Michael: A masterpiece, yes.
Marc Tchalik: The first piece that we really started to learn together and we spent a lot of time playing this piece and still today we're still playing it. We also recorded it in 2020 when we made this first album and this was the center of this album, it was this huge piece.
Michael: Do you find there to be musical elements that you must focus on particularly in Hahn? I think of his similarities to Mozart with the clarity of texture and the fact that the tempo matters so critically in each piece. When you're rehearsing his music, what elements come up repeatedly?
Louise Tchalik: Yes, exactly. I think it's very close to in a way to Mozart because of all the small articulations. It's—it can be very tricky actually technically to play it because it's also chromatic music.
Michael: Chromatic, so music that's moving freely between different keys.
Louise Tchalik: In some parts of his music can be very light and joyful, but some are very dark also like the slow movements and harmonically confusing—I mean it's like elaborate. So always to get this—these different moods and to get them really right and to pass them to the audience is always something we want to be sure of so we work on this.
Michael: There are multiple recordings on this new album that are first recordings of the pieces and the most notable is the piano trio that opens the album. How complete is that piece and what, if anything, did you have to do to make it playable from what exists?
Marc Tchalik: I think it's—it's a very interesting piece because it's a piece that is really related to his relationship with to Marcel Proust because he wrote it during the beginning of his love story with Marcel when they were staying in Brittany in Beg-Meil at the time. And he couldn't finish this piece and the piece followed him the year—the following year and during the end of their affair and he said about—about this piece that he was held to it attached to this piece with ties impossible to break. And it was really hard for him to finish this piece and he couldn't actually, that's why he wrote only the first movement because it was so emotional for him I think to write this piece that it was impossible to go further.
Louise Tchalik: And the piece is complete. It's—we didn't have to make research or anything because the first movement is really written completely. And also, so we learned that he had written some small things for the next movements which he never finished but actually he used these extracts for example the violin concerto and also another piece so this material actually really followed him during his entire life.
Michael: Right, we'll point out that he remained friends with Proust for the rest of Proust's life, which was about 25 more years after that. Most importantly, I would ask why for music that is as likeable as this is, because you can hear this music one time and like it immediately, what took it so long to be revived?
Louise Tchalik: I think it's connected to Reynaldo Hahn's career. He used to be really, really famous. For example, young person who were studying piano at the time they used to play a lot of Reynaldo Hahn and it was really a music of the society of this time. And somehow he got forgotten because he was more like in this—he was friends with a lot of writers maybe more than with musicians. I mean, that's how I can explain this. And also so we talked to Eva de Vengohechea, who is his grand-niece, and she told us that until the 90s he was kind of forgotten and so there he had an audience of—she says grandmas because it's like young women who used to study piano and sing his melodies when they were young. And of course the gay community who really who knew him because of Marcel Proust and I think it's really important to play his music now because it's really beautiful. I mean, yeah, and people always love it.
Marc Tchalik: Yeah, I think it's also the fact that at his time most of the composers they were looking for some forms of modernity or of new ways to express themselves and he wasn't into this, he really liked what was done in the past and he didn't have the need to search for really new things and so maybe that's why also he's not that famous today.
Michael: Well, you've done a great service in making this album. I've been waiting for the piano trio for about 25 years when I was in school. I knew it existed but I had no way of hearing it until your album.
Louise Tchalik: Amazing.
Michael: Marc and Louise Tchalik are from the Tchalik Quartet and they have made this new album of Reynaldo Hahn's chamber music. Thanks so much for talking with us on First Take today.
Marc Tchalik: Thank you for having us.
Louise Tchalik: Thank you.