Katia and Marielle Labèque: 55 album review

In 1969, two teenage students at the Paris Conservatoire recorded Olivier Messiaen’s formidable Visions de l’Amen under the composer’s doubtless nerve-racking supervision. It was released in 1970. Fifty-five years later, Katia and Marielle Labèque’s musical curiosity is undimmed as this handsome three-disc tribute set demonstrates. A mix of new recordings and classics, it reveals the extent of their omnivorous appetites, from 20th-century modernism to minimalism and jazz.

The artwork for 55 Photograph: Deutsche Grammophon

Although best known as a two-piano duo, there’s plenty of four-hands repertoire here, including an iridescent new recording of Le Jardin Féerique from Ravel’s Ma Mère l’Oye alongside music by Bizet, Fauré (two movements from his Dolly Suite) and a finger-shredding Dance of the Earth from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Works by Gershwin, Bernstein and De Falla are among other highlights.

French music is foregrounded with a boisterous account of Debussy’s Fêtes as transcribed by Ravel and a poised Clair de Lune in Dutilleux’s two-piano transcription. Music by female composers, much of it newly recorded, is also welcome, including by Fanny Mendelssohn and Lili Boulanger, but also tangy miniatures from Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz, a haunting Nocturne by the marvellous Croatian composer Dora Pejačević and a boogie-woogie spiritual by Margaret Bonds.

New music was their first love, however, and there’s a feast of it here, from 20th-century iconoclasts such as Berio and Cage to meditative Arvo Pärt, film music by Philip Glass, whose work they’ve long championed, and Bryce Dessner, whose Basque-inspired Goiza Larrunen is a standout. Ending where they began, Messiaen’s barnstorming Amen de la Consommation rounds off a thoughtfully curated compilation.

Stream it on Apple Music (above) or on Spotify