Six Pieces from Jeux d’enfants, Op.22

Rêverie: L’Escarpolette (The Swing)

Impromptu: La Toupie (The Spinning Top)

Scherzo: Les Cheveaux de bois (The Merry-go-round)

Nocturne: Colin-Maillard (Blind Man’s Buff)

Duo: Petit mari, petite femme! (Little Husband, Little Wife)

Galop: Le Bal (The Dance)

Debussy’s Petite Suite, Fauré’s Dolly , and Ravel’s Ma Mère l’Oye are all part of a piano-duet tradition which goes back to Bizet’s Jeux d’enfants. Although, like much else he wrote, it was not a great success in the composer’s lifetime, the work has made a lasting impression on the French musical psyche: while it appeals to children, as it was designed to do, it has proved to be no less fascinating for adults.

Dedicated to Mesdemoiselles Marguerite de Beaulieu and Fanny Gouin, it was published in 1872 as a collection of twelve short pieces. This does not mean, however, that a selection of any number of them cannot legitimately be made for public performance. Bizet himself was uncertain how many to include in the original publication and it was he of course who selected five of them - Trompette et tambour, La poupée, La Toupie, Petit mari, petite femme! and Le Bal - for inclusion in the Petite Suite d’orchestre (there is also an orchestral version of Les Quatre Coins, which Bizet at one time intended as the finale of the Petite Suite). If he did not think they would make good orchestral music he left them out. L’Escarpolette, with its arpeggios swinging up the bass and down the treble, a dreamy melody for the second pianist’s right hand in the middle, is an essentially piano-duet inspiration. The spinning figuration and sudden pauses of La Toupie, on the other hand, are no less effective in one medium than the other.

If Bizet made an orchestral arrangement of Les Cheveaux de bois - and there is evidence that he did, although it has never been found - it would be nothing like as much fun as when its giddy roundabout motion is sustained by just the two pianists.The stealthily nocturnal Colin-Maillard is another essentially piano inspiration - partly because it so clearly echoes Schumann, whose Kinderszenen is the distant ancestor of all these French pieces for or about children.

The last two pieces in the present selection are also the last two pieces in the Petite Suite d’orchestre:there is, after all, no better way to end than to indulge in the not so innocent sentiment of Petit Mari, petite femme! and then to sweep it all away in the galloping exhilaration of the Le Bal.

Gerald Larner©