Lucas Debargue, the French pianist La Jolla Music Society hosts on April 17, has managed to build an enviable touting and recording career while ignoring most of the accepted paths to success. His 2015 Special Prize at the International Tchaikovsky Competition may well the only conventional move in his career.
Debargue didn’t take his first piano lesson until the late age of ten. Deciding at fifteen he was more interested in literature, he ceased playing entirely for three years. At 20, he was invited to participate in a music festival in his hometown of Compiegne, France. His passion for piano rekindled, he accepted respected piano teacher Rena Shereshevskaya’s invitation to study with her at École Normale de Musique de Paris and his unique career began.
Fourteen years later, Debargue can look back on a career that already includes seven imaginative albums (including recordings of undervalued composers like Nikolai Medtner, Karol Szymanowski, and Milosz Magin) and performances in august venues from Carnegie Hall and Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw to the Berliner Philharmonie.
A call with Debargue in Paris in March revealed an agreeable, passionately autonomous personality with a poetic grasp of English and a freely associative mind. Debargue on his initial discovery of music, for example: “I really started because of a sudden outburst of passion towards classical music that just caught me around the age of 10. It was one recording [a Mozart piano concerto] that I played … on my little sound system.”
“It completely … changed my life forever. I became straight a ‘drug addict’ with this music. So I needed from the very beginning my ‘dose’. One may talk about some sort of epiphany, like a meeting with beauty that was very unexpected.”
A late-blooming former grocery-store clerk with only four years of formal piano training, Debargue had to develop focus and thick skin early. “Obviously, I don’t have the classical musical background. I’m not born in the family of artists, classical music lovers. So it’s not so surprising that I met some resistance.”
“I learned to stay away from too many comments related to my playing. It was either ‘you’re an amateur’ or ‘you are a genius’. I could not rely on this. I focused more on the words of a teacher. But you cannot rely completely on a teacher. I needed to get closer to the composers, understand their language, understand harmony, understand how the pieces are built. A lot of things are told by the music itself. I rely on the composers more than on the opinions of some critics, musicologists or teachers or colleagues. I had to build my own way.”
Genre-crossing — staying in his lane — is not on Debargue’s agenda. In his teens he played bass and drums in a power trio, and he briefly earned his keep playing piano accompaniment for singers in a Paris tourist bar. His is not an elitist perspective. “As a music addict, I’m very happy to find beauty in any kinds of music. The only criterion I would use to actually receive a piece of music is really how much music is in there, how much I vibrate together with the piece, how much I react, how much I am taken on a sound journey.”
He counts the best jazz artists as “some of the greatest music makers of the 20th century. As a classical pianist, I need them. I need Thelonious Monk. I need Charlie Parker. I need Bill Evans. I cannot ignore them.”
So-called performance tradition matters about as little to Debargue as genre. “I don’t believe so much in a tradition of playing … imitating the great performers. What matters the most is meeting personally with a piece of music. It’s not only executing, it’s also commenting. You need to get involved personally in this. It needs to travel through you for your own emotions, for your own understanding. You will never get to do a great job by just imitating … I don’t want to hear again the same rubato in Chopin. I want to discover some new vision.”
Debargue respects historical masters like Glenn Gould and contemporary virtuosos like Daniil Trifonov for bucking tradition and finding their own interpretations, as he has with Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, and Liszt. “Even respecting scrupulously, meticulously what is written on the score, there is still a big space for creativity, personal decision making. When you play a recital, you are alone with the piece on stage. You have somehow to stand with your guts, together with the composer and their piece.”
“If you don’t believe in what you are doing, if it doesn’t come from a personal statement, I wonder what will happen. I would always prefer to disturb by making some decisions in my interpretation that are maybe not the tradition. I would not do this for the sake of a provocation but just [because] I need to believe in what I’m doing … You have to create, to find tools to fall in love with any single note of the piece.”
In La Jolla, besides works by Ravel and Scriabin, Debargue will perform five varied pieces by compatriot Gabriel Faure, a composer he reveres so deeply he recorded his entire solo piano output — 50+ pieces across four discs — last year. For extra sonority Debargue recorded it on a 102-key Paulello Opus 102 piano (he’ll use one of The Conrad’s Steinway concert grands April 17). The recording (on Sony Classics) is an eye-opening tour de force.
Last year also saw Debargue compose his virtuosic “Suite en ré mineur,” which will follow the Faure on April 17. Inspired by Baroque dance suites and firmly anchored in counterpoint, it nevertheless pushes the envelope. Though a minuet, it’s so “particularly aggressive” that Debargue dubbed it a “War Minuet”. And notwithstanding its Baroque foundation, Debargue admits the suite encompasses multiple styles and genres: “Classical, Romantic, Modern, and even subtle hints of jazz, pop, and rock.”
Atypically, Debargue’s twenty-odd compositions, which include a concertino, a piano quartet, and piano trio, are not late-career affectations. “As soon as I started to play music, I started to compose … I was fascinated by this alphabet of music, to write sounds on a page of paper. [I’ve written] a lot of chamber music and solo piano, and a bit of songs also. I know all of it by heart, and it’s very important for me to always have it in the fingers. [Composition] is kind of making love, a love story between inspiration and craftsmanship [that] gives birth to something solid that can live its own life, that can walk on its legs.”
Yet Debargue claims he takes little personal pride in his creations. “I’m very happy when I’m playing my pieces with musicians [and] sometimes they say, ‘Oh, this is not sounding so well. This is not technically so comfortable.’ I am very happy to change my score. For me, it’s really everything for the sake of music.”