Paul Castanier in Claviers Celtiques, 1979, by request

This was requested by a reader and I knew nothing at all about it, but decided to give it a chance sight unseen, ear unheard, when I had a little extra in the paypal balance.

First of all, I translated the back blurb since it's quite beautifully written, by one Maurice Frot:

Antique furniture is bought new by contemporaries who wish to furnish in a modern manner. New, the music of today's folk rings under his fingers and in the breath of artists crazy for the modern.  At the beginning of the tradition, innovations were made by fanatics young enough to dare knock over a tradition more ancient. Enriched through time by a chain of popular artists, their inspiration has changed little by little into a fortress that, defended with weapons in hand by the users of habit, has become exclusively the property of the invalids of imagination.  The conservatory of tradition would want to put it under the dust of a museum.  However the past is not any more immobile that the ocean, mother of all our pasts. As she changes, unfurls, or yells, by the eye that looks at her.  If that eye is that of a modern man, the past exists in the hour of tomorrow.  In the ear of Paul Castanier, who is its eye, still sing the flutes of Kabyle shepherds to whom he listened, as a boy, with a joyous heart.  Because this universal man, this visualizer of all possible worlds, is an individual uprooted, with the only roots the body of a flute and the impalpable brightness of a sky immense that he can never forget.  The heat that he misses, it would take him 20 years of wandering to find in a companion.  Such a girl of Brittany, she would take his hand and offer, in plenitude, the blinding clarity of sky and water of the ends of the lands that fascinated him and first of all, or mostly, offer its music: the music of a people with healthy roots, with multiple roots, in fact.  Past the laughter and dancing, he hears there as if in a rosary the tragedies that make up the Breton soul, the taboos of yesterday, and the oppression of today, the dignity lost and perhaps now found.

This record is a double gift of love.  The musician, oh, how she sounds!  smiling and serious giving him her music, and he, returned back to the pure emotion of childhood, concertist of the immediate, he dialogues with these ancestral themes -- and also with fantasies!  Upended, enthusiastic, taken by passions (for music? for Danielle?) he cannot resist at the joy of impulsively creating his own themes!  Thus Giono invented Provence, Stravinsky and Bartok gratifying the slavic folk song with new blood, throwing himself he deploys the banners, in the riot throws his flames and his heart and the flute and the sky and his symbolic universe and his vision of wild thoughts, all there in the bewitched legions, and they sing, they dance, they groan and cry of joy, burning harmonies, dynamite of emotion.

In the rigor, under the vigilant leadership of the musician of fest noz who dams the torrent at the limits of the undanceable, Paul Castanier, here Breton in heart and bowels, sets down his personal inspiration in the communal basket of tradition.  And to all those happy and sad fools that have created him he responds through the ages by stretching out his hand in brotherhood.

The French language really lends itself easily to such poetic transports.  Sadly, there is actually no flute in here, just keyboards, usually acoustic piano, augmented by a bit of electric keyboards, very lightly undertaken, and a tiny bit of accordion here and there.  Many of the songs use fugue-like passages and repeat melodies to add immense interest.  There is a lot of overdubbing at play here, with extra piano passages adding some texture or melodic contrast.  A clear classical education shines through too.

Consider the track called Pera geta Elena:





Much preferable to any Chopin recital I've ever heard in public.
Going outside the bounds of just the piano, here is the previous track, called An amzer dremenet:





Pretty sure there are dubs in that one, since some identical notes are played on two pianos in the middle passage.