“Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words are very well known, yet little known at the same time,” says Bertrand Chamayou. “There are 48 of them in all, but fewer than ten of them feature regularly in concert programmes.”
With this recording of the complete Songs without Words the French pianist applies his probing imagination to a collection of pieces which, over a period of nearly 200 years, have remained captivating for their refinement, charm and intimacy of tone.
“The Songs without Words constitute a kind of journal that Mendelssohn kept intermittently in the course of his life,” he explains. “He appropriated a particular form, the Lied, which is all about text and narrative … a form which creates its own world in the space of just a few minutes … The absence of text – as one constantly strives to phrase and breathe like a singer, and to exercise one’s imagination without the support of words – takes the pianist on a journey into an interior world.” For Chamayou, that journey is filled with nostalgia. “It seems to me to be inseparable from this music … Going through pages of the Songs without Words is like leafing through an old album or opening a trunk filled with a jumble of faded family photos and memorabilia, and then rifling through them, dipping into the stories that each of them brings alive for us …” To quote Mendelssohn himself, this is the kind of music that “fills the soul with a thousand things better than words”.
