To her impressive discography, French pianist Hélène Grimaud adds the album Essentials, gathering together more than 20 masterpieces of the piano repertoire selected from her recordings, many of which were very well received by critics. It includes works for solo piano, chamber music, piano concerto movements and even opera. The range of works chosen covers a very large part of the piano repertoire, from the Baroque era to the music of today. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin, Rachmaninov, Debussy, as well as more contemporary composers such as Nitin Sawhney are all represented here. This combination allows us to admire the stylistic diversity of the pianist, who interprets Bach’s volatile Partita for solo violin in E major as accurately as Debussy’s mysterious prelude La Cathédrale engloutie. Moreover, of the few works by Debussy presented on this compilation, we must emphasize the interpreter’s ability to make any temporal scale disappear, and to render the rhythmic parameter very unstable, an essential feature of this composer’s work. One never tires of the great musicality of this experienced pianist, nor of the finesse of her interpretations.
