We really didn’t believe it anymore. 25 years ago, Analekta published a 1er book of preludes of Debussy with a rare sonic magic. The pianist was Francine Kay. Then she disappeared. We knew that she was teaching in the United States, at Princeton University. And one day this happens: “Things lived and dreamed”, from the name of a collection by composer Josef Suk (1874-1935), which here becomes for the music lover a dreamed thing finally lived. Janáček’s sonata which opens the CD has not even started for three minutes when time stops. Twenty-five years have passed and we are on the morrow of Debussy’s preludes: the magic and the sense of sound are totally intact. The emotion is gripping, especially today, thinking of the massacre in Ukraine, listening to this Street Sonata written for a workman killed with a bayonet. Francine Kay especially values the rare cycle Životem a snem (“Things lived and dreamed”) by Suk, of a splendid harmonic research. The disc appears ultimately as a deepening of the recent Dvořák by Leif Ove Andsnes.
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