French pianist Emmanuel Despax views Après un rêve as his most personal album yet. Featuring music by Poulenc, Debussy, Ravel, and others, Despax has dedicated it to the memory of his late grandfather Jacques Charpentreau, a poet and mentor to Emmanuel’s artistic development. “For him, it mattered a lot to know the context of whatever art form you are involved with,” Despax tells Apple Music Classical, “and he encouraged me from a very early age to know as much as I could surrounding an era—what was going on artistically, economically, politically. All of this is relevant to getting to know a composer’s psyche.” The particular era examined on Après un rêve is that of the Belle Époque, a golden age of creativity in French cultural life which ended with the outbreak in 1914 of World War I. “This is repertoire I’ve always wanted to record, and a lot of it is based on poetry,” Despax explains. “I often discussed with my grandfather the connections between the poetry and the music in these pieces.” Central to the album is Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit, a suite in three movements which take poems by Aloysius Bertrand as their starting point. Its finale “Scarbo,” a portrait of a malevolent goblin, is famed for its extreme technical difficulty. But Despax points to the delicate opening movement “Ondine” as posing equal challenges. “There’s a wonderful shimmering effect of water on the first page, marked to be played very quietly, and it’s incredibly difficult. But the effect is genius, and I actually think Gaspard de la nuit is probably the greatest work of the 20th century. Its scope of expression is just enormous—it’s astonishing Ravel managed to push piano boundaries this far.” If Gaspard’s status as a masterpiece is undisputed, the piano works of Ravel’s contemporary Francis Poulenc are, Despax argues, still relatively underrated. Après un rêve includes Poulenc’s Soirées de Nazelles, a set of whimsical mood portraits close to Despax’s heart. “One of my greatest joys is introducing works which are less known,” he says. “And I think Poulenc is a wonderful composer, very misunderstood and criticized for not being progressive enough.” Soirées “has incredible melodies,” Despax adds, “and there is no more charming, humorous and sarcastic composer than Poulenc. As pianists, I think it’s our duty to look at lesser-played gems like this.”