From our own region
**** Erik & David Desimpelaere, two brothers, musicians. Erik is the pianist and David the double bassist. In their relatively young career, they have already navigated some impressive waters and chose to dedicate a CD to a young Flemish pianist, André Devaere, who fell very quickly in the outbreak of the First World War. Immediately, the young talented duo Devaere/Devreese came to an abrupt end.That Devreese was Godfried Devreese (1893-1962) of whom we receive a transcription for piano and double bass of a song that Devreese wrote in memory of his fallen friend. Together with two other songs that evoke this disastrous time, a tribute has now been created in an arrangement by Frédéric Devreese (1929), the well-known son. The cd opens with the 'Benvenuta Suite' by Frédéric. A work that alludes to the recreational music of that turbulent period before, during and after WWI. Closely following this is the 'Suite Populaire Espagnole' by Manuel De Falla (1876-1946), a work from 1914, but from before Europe went up in flames in the latter half of that year. That fire which caused so much suffering and buried masses of the dead in the soil of Flanders Fields, but also elsewhere in Europe such as the Balkans for example.
The aforementioned songs by Godfried Devreese are an intimate, softly weeping, resigned ode not only to that pianist friend, but to all those millions of young men barely out of their childhood and before they were sent to the killing fields in their homeland probably harboured the most beautiful dreams for the life that awaited them.
With the Romanian Folk Dances by Béla Bartók we arrive in 1915. It seems that for the Hungarian composer the war was something far away. In any case, ordinary country life again became part of his inspiration to create a complex work on paper through folk melodies.
In five collected melodies by Georges Gershwin (1898-1937) Erik Desimpelaere found sufficient material to arrange them for piano and double bass. They are the lightest and most jazzy works on this cd and the fact that the war which caused so much suffering in parts of Europe was clearly very far away from the bars in New York is evident...
The CD closes with the song that took on a life of its own: Smile by Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977). It is the closing piece of this recording that makes this cd into a unity with Godfried Devreese as the central figure.
The brothers Erik and David are a strong duo that with feeling and conviction pursue music from a period that changed the world and because that change apparently was not sufficiently shocking, followed once more with WWII. That after that war nothing would ever be the same as it once was, we know...
- WHAT: Smile, works around and about Godfried Devreese for piano and double bass
- WHO: Erik Desimpelaere, piano and David Desimpelaere, double bass
- RELEASE: Dynamic - CDS7809
