La Triomphante by Alexandre Tharaud : « It is impossible to describe the shock I had on discovering Marcelle Meyer's recordings at the age of seventeen. Keeping them well away from the Conservatoire, where no one even breathed her name, I listened to them all night long. Today the enchantment is still the same. The main thing was that Marcelle Meyer had a unique way of playing the piano, with a solidly robust technique put at the service of an unfailingly fluid line. Behind the phrasing, behind the ample, apparently improvisatory approach — you might think she has just opened the score — workmanship worthy of a goldsmith is evident. Listening to her, more than to anyone else, I discovered desire and instinct. I am the jealous guardian of part of her music library, passed on to me by her daughter, and this, just like her recordings, bears witness to her gigantic repertoire and daring curiosity. Stravinsky's Octet sits alongside works by Tommasini, Sabata, Rieti and Casella. French composers such as Auric, Wiener or Satie are found side by side with Tcherepnin and Bartök! She was the revelatory visionary of her age, with her complete involvement in the contemporary music of her time, her unwavering friendship for the greatest composers, painters and poets, her conviction that composers like Rameau and Couperin should be played with as much passion as we gladly bestow on their cousins Bach and Scarlatti, and her faith in Chabrier, whom she championed as she did Ravel or Debussy. And to my way of thinking she was the greatest French woman pianist. » There was no more timeless than the art of Marcelle Meyer. Her first and most legitimate survival in fact comes from the way she reinvented Couperin and Rameau, making them current. The most astonishing thing is that she found (probably instinctively, that inexplicable but infallible instinct which is simply called taste) the tone, the colour, the fantasy of articulation and phrasing, the sovereign freedom which saved them from the character that was lent to them, that of musicians of the past, academic. Well, with academics, she simply went classical. Being what she was, it was almost self-evident. The whole of this legacy is now conveniently available to us. By the simple fact of being very firmly and to the very end herself, an interpreter of humility and genius, sublimating all those she interprets. In the total self-effacement which is at the same time full self-expression: an artist's lesson. END
