David Fray – named Instrumentalist of the Year in France's Victoires de la Musique 2010 – retains his focus on Austro-German repertoire with his second CD of concertos for Virgin Classics: Mozart's Concertos Nos 22 and 25 with London's Philharmonia Orchestra under Dutch violinist-turned-conductor (and Music Director of the Dallas Symphony), Jaap van Zweden.
"Above all, I would like to advocate a certain vision of music and to make it accessible without altering its value or the level on which it operates." David Fray – Instrumentalist of the Year in France's Victoires de la Musique 2010 – turns to Mozart for his second CD of concertos for Virgin Classics. The response of The Sunday Times to his last solo release was: "No Schubert-lover should miss this piano recital by David Fray," while The Guardian evoked "pianism of the highest class".
Fray's last release was a solo programme of Schubert, a figure who embodies the transition to Romanticism from the Classicism of Mozart, a fellow Austrian. The recital was praised by the critics for its distinctive and many-layered interpretation: "No Schubert-lover should miss this piano recital by David Fray," urged the BBC Music Magazine, while The Sunday Times felt that: "These are wonderful performances by the young French pianist David Fray, a player with a beautiful touch and the finest control of dynamics and chording ... By taking his time, without ever weakening the music's inexorable momentum, Fray fills every note with meaning, in such a way that we feel intensely each mercurial change of mood and colour and texture, relish Schubert's astonishing harmonic invention to the full, and relive the heartbreak, the ferocity, the elation, the visionary flights of these inexhaustible works." The Guardian was enthused by "the sheer lucidity and polish of Fray's playing, its exceptional command of colour and touch, and the way he invariably uses that range of sound to point up musical structures in a meaningful way … pianism of the highest class."
In an interview with the French magazine Classica, Fray expressed his seriousness of purpose in music-making: "It is possible to obtain an infinite range of gradations with difference types of touch, though how they are achieved remains something of a mystery. You don't know quite how you are doing it, but you have the impression of walking at the edge of a precipice … I can weight a five-part chord in a thousand different ways, but it mustn't become a matter of demonstrating technical mastery."
"Everything should be for the sake of the music alone. Completely. Above all, I would like to advocate a certain vision of music and to make it accessible without altering its value or the level on which it operates. I am not here to 'popularise' music, because I believe profoundly that it doesn't need to be popularised, being by its very nature accessible to everyone."
Two of the names he cited in the interview came from much older generations, Wilhelm Furtwängler and Sviatoslav Richter, "I've always thoughts that your real age and your 'internal' age have nothing to do with each other," he explained. "Schubert was dead at 31 and I am in my late twenties. I am not far from him. What matters is the relationship between you and a work, and what you have to say from inside that work. From Furtwängler I learned that you could give music enormous tension through the sheer power of persuasion.
"I'm an old-fashioned musician, a craftsman who likes a job well done. I am distrustful of technology, but I understand it is something one has to accept and live with. The faults of our era must not contaminate or destroy what we are fundamentally and what we do as artists. Basically, I don't like making compromises. I would like to reconcile the irreconcilable: flexibility and discipline; singing line and rhythmic energy; charm and gravitas, light-heartedness and tragedy … both as a musician and as a person."
