Lise de la Salle plays Bach, Liszt

Since the release in the spring of 2003 of her first CD (Rachmaninoff-Ravel), acclaimed by the international press, Lise de la Salle has achieved a great deal. Coming barely three months after she won First Prize at the Young Concert Artists European Auditions, her Special Prize at the 2004 Young Artists International Auditions in New York led to a series of concert appearances in the key American musical centres. In the same year she made debuts in Japan and at the Schleswig- Holstein Music Festival. She has also recently been invited at the Festival of La Roque d'Anthéron in Provence. Yet this sixteen-year-old, currently in the postgraduate class at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris, is no over-drilled child prodigy, but an astonishingly mature artist. The most striking thing about her is her sense of balance: sure of herself creatively yet open-minded, perfectly controlled in her playing yet not content to stick to the status quo, Lise continues on her path. The programme of her second recording offers further proof of this taste for balance: Bach and Liszt, Protestant linearity and Catholic fervour, abstract architectonics and untrammelled subjectivism, the Baroque and the high Romantic, the crystalline and the emotion-drenched. In her interpretation of several remarkable transcriptions of organ works, not to mention the celebrated Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, this young pianist gives Bach amazing modernity. Her limpid, perfectly controlled playing is equally successful in a fine selection of Liszt, with an outstandingly memorable First Mephisto Waltz. This recital gives us the opportunity to appreciate Lise de la Salle as she is today: already a great artist; promise of so much still to come. 

　　After a text by Manuel Brug