Harmonious

sun 25 dec 2016 18:00 hrs

En Blanc et Noir – pianist Noël Lee plays the black and white keys. A five-part mini series, compiled by Evert Jan Nagtegaal. Noël Lee as part of an ensemble, as a composer, solo pianist and song pianist. Part 5: the accompanist.

Online, even after his death in 2013, you can still visit his website, Noël Lee. On it is his impressive list of compositions and his largest discography, meticulously updated by Noël himself. It is with the same precision he kept his diaries, in which he wrote what he had played, who he had worked with, who had visited him at Villa Laugier, his remarks on works, his travels and who he had met. He could remembers people and their names remarkably well. If you look at that discography, it’s notable how often he had cooperated with singers. He himself told in an interview that this had started during his first years, in the early 50’s, in Paris. He was working as a pianist at the classes of an elderly Jewish lady, Maria Freund, who had been a famous singer before the war. On the age of 80, she was still singing Schubert’s Erlkönig, with a waning voice, but full of drama. Noël went on working with many of her students and came in contact, through record company Valois, with Bernard Kruysen. Together, they gave many concerts, in the Netherlands as well, and many works were recorded. And Lee continued working with singers all his life.

It used to be the case that critics would elaborate on a singer’s recital, describing each song and would add a single sentence at the end, saying the singer was adequately accompanied by…And indeed, there were pianists who were modest and were of service to the singer. ‘You played beautifully’ Elisabeth Swarzkopf once said to her accompanist Gerald Moore. ‘I didn’t even hear you.’ Noël Lee was of a new generation of pianists, who saw working with a singer as a partnership of two equals. This made him a pioneer is a time in which notable accompanists like Gerald Moore, Dalton Baldwin and Rudolf Jansen were more demure, sometimes obedient even and was Lee ahead of accompanist like Sviatoslav Richter, Helmut Deutsch and Vladimir Ashkenazy, who act like soloist who are able to settle.

So he and Kruysen worked together often, as did he and Anne-Marie Rodde and Udo Reinemann. It’s quite bizarre how Noël Lee and Udo Reinnemann died one day apart; Reinemann died 14 July 2013, Lee on the 15th.

1. Claude Debussy – Noël des enfants qui n’ont plus de maisons

Bernard Kruysen, baritone and Noël Lee, piano

(LP ASTRÉE AS58)