A student of Franck, Vincent d’Indy founded the Schola Cantorum de Paris where he taught for many years. He was also a conductor, with a...

A student of Franck, Vincent d’Indy founded the Schola Cantorum de Paris where he taught for many years. He was also a conductor, with a busy schedule of international touring. His compositions were permeated by the influence of Wagner- he attended the premiere of the Ring cycle- but in time he also absorbed the influence of French folk music, especially from the Vivarais, his ancestral home. Vincent d’Indy’s large-scale Piano Sonata is one of a small but masterful sequence of non-programmatic instrumental works that he wrote in the first decade of the 20th century. Notable for a novel application of variation form in its opening movement it fuses experimentation with expressive power. Poetic atmospheres and landscapes are evoked in the Tableaux de voyage, postcards of his walks in Germany. The sonata was recorded in the castle Les Faugs in Ardèche, where d’Indy lived – the same place where the work was composed in 1907. Jean-Pierre Armengaud is today acknowledged as one of the great interpreters of French music, and has recorded critically acclaimed releases of Debussy, Roussel, Poulenc and Aubert for Naxos.