Perfomer : Jean-Pierre Ferey (2013)
Jean Émile Paul Cras (1879-1932) was a 20th-century French composer and career naval officer. His musical compositions were inspired by his native Brittany, his travels to Africa, and most of all, by his sea voyages. As a naval commander he served with distinction in the Adriatic Campaign during World War I.
Cras was born and died in Brest. His father was naval medical officer. He was accepted into the navy at the age of 17. As a midshipman cadet on the Iphigénie, he travelled in the Americas, the West Indies and Senegal. His mathematical skills led to his proposing a number of innovations in technical practices which were adopted by the navy, including a navigational plotter protractor known as Règle Cras (Cras ruler).
In 1931 he was appointed Major General of the Port of Brest and promoted to rear admiral. He occupied this position when he died after a short illness.
His daughter, Colette Cras, a concert pianist for whom he wrote his piano concerto, married the Polish-French composer Alexandre Tansman.
Cras met the composer Henri Duparc early in his career and the two became lifelong friends. Duparc called Cras "the son of my soul". Though Cras's duties in the French navy left him little time to devote to his musical work, he continued to compose throughout his life, mainly writing chamber music and songs.
Although most of his output dates from after the war, much of his most ambitious work, the opera Polyphème, was written and orchestrated during the war. It was acclaimed at its premiere in 1922, giving Cras a burst of notoriety in the French press. The music is impressionistic, restless, and highly chromatic, in the spirit of Chausson and Duparc.
Cras's later work developed a more acerbic style comparable to that of Béla Bartók, though formally close to César Franck. He considered chamber music to be his forte, writing that "this refined musical form has become for me the most essential". His String Trio integrates a wide range of styles - including North African influences - and his Trio for Strings and Piano blends African and Eastern melodic patterns with Breton musical traditions into a coherent whole. The critic Michel Fleury compares his work to the Japonist style of the artist Henri Rivière revealing "a stylised Breton land, as though it had been passed through the sieve of his varied experiences gained in the four quarters of the globe."
At the request of his publisher, Jean Cras assembled in 1912 five pieces designed separately and published them under the title "Poèmes intimes" :
1. En Islande
2. Preludio con fughetta
3. Au fil de l’eau
4. Recueillement
5. La maison du matin
The first two date from his stay in Iceland (1902), the fourth from his stay in Bizerte in Tunisia (1904), while the third and fifth were written in Brest. The pieces, each dedicated to a different person (Mme Benedicktson, Henri Duparc, Ricardo Viñes, the composer’s wife and the pianist Marthe Dron) were created by Viñes at the National Music Society in 1918.
The fourth piece owe its title and its climate to the poem by Baudelaire "Recueillement", of which Cras places the first verse at the top of the piece (”Be wise, oh my Pain, and keep still”) and the last verse at the very end (“Hear, my dear, hear the sweet Night Walking…”)
Sources :
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Cras
www.bruzanemediabase.com/fre/OEuvres/Poemes-intimes-pour-piano-Jean-Cras
Charles BAUDELAIRE (1821-1867)
Recueillement
Sois sage, ô ma Douleur, et tiens-toi plus tranquille.
Tu réclamais le Soir ; il descend ; le voici :
Une atmosphère obscure enveloppe la ville,
Aux uns portant la paix, aux autres le souci.
Pendant que des mortels la multitude vile,
Sous le fouet du Plaisir, ce bourreau sans merci,
Va cueillir des remords dans la fête servile,
Ma douleur, donne-moi la main ; viens par ici,
Loin d'eux. Vois se pencher les défuntes Années,
Sur les balcons du ciel, en robes surannées ;
Surgir du fond des eaux le Regret souriant ;
Le Soleil moribond s'endormir sous une arche,
Et, comme un long linceul traînant à l'Orient,
Entends, ma chère, entends la douce Nuit qui marche.
Original audio :
ua-cam.com/video/BMjGuBG8SCY/v-deo.html&ab_channel=Jean-PierreFerey-Topic
Sheet music :
s9.imslp.org/files/imglnks/usimg/8/81/IMSLP29203-PMLP64791-Recueillement.pdf
You can listen to the music I make on Soundcloud
soundcloud.com/ewan_grnc