If, as Ned Rorem likes to say, everything and everyone in the world is either French or German, then the pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet would seem well positioned to bridge this aesthetic divide. He was born in 1961 in Lyon to a French father who played the violin and a German mother who was his first piano teacher.
Still, from his nuanced and vividly colored style of playing, not to mention his debonair personality, Mr. Thibaudet would seem as French as French could be. Weighty, structural Germanic music is not his thing. You don't often hear him playing Beethoven sonatas or the Brahms concertos. But he is an exquisite interpreter of music by Debussy, Ravel, Satie and the half-French, Polish-born Chopin.
Schumann is the one German composer Mr. Thibaudet is regularly drawn to. He has recorded Schumann's lovely "Arabeske" and the technically formidable "Symphonic Études," and he played both works on Wednesday evening at Carnegie Hall for the first half of a Schumann-Ravel recital.
Of course, Mr. Thibaudet treats Schumann like an honorary Frenchman, and he achieved mixed results here. The "Arabeske" was like some rustling Impressionistic swirl of watery sonorities and wistful lyricism, which blurred inner voices and rippling rhythmic patterns. In the "Symphonic Études," a set of variations, Mr. Thibaudet admirably interspersed into the score the five seldom-heard variations that Schumann left out of the published version of the work. He played with command and impetuosity right though the finale, a heady march. Yet there was something unsettled about his conception. Sometimes phrases were stretched with rubato, other times whole passages were driven hard.
But after intermission he turned to Ravel, and all was forgiven. First came Ravel's exhilarating yet tender homage to Schubert's waltzes, "Valses Nobles et Sentimentales," played with marvelous clarity, Classical refinement and cool beauty.
Mr. Thibaudet ended with the mercilessly difficult "Gaspard de la Nuit" in a stunning performance that showed the dark side of Impressionism. At the beginning of "Ondine," the first movement, he shaped the slinky theme so that it made circles around the fluttering repeated chords, like a shimmering wave of milky harmonies. He brought haunting repose to "Le Gibet" ("The Gallows"), then took the frenzied "Scarbo" at a dangerously fast tempo. Some thematic lines and inner voices were swallowed up in dizzying spirals of notes. Still, the hellbent fervor of "Scarbo" was balanced by a light touch and biting articulation.
There were ovations and encores, of course: a Chopin nocturne; a novelty piece, "Prelude Pathétique" by the Russian pianist Shura Cherkassky; and Debussy's ubiquitous "Clair de Lune," played with such grace and simplicity that it sounded completely fresh — and, it almost goes without saying, thoroughly French.
