As a tribute to the great French artist, poet, playwright, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau (1889–1963), Irish pianist Isabelle O’Connell has assembled an imaginative program of music by composers associated with Cocteau, specifically Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, and Germaine Tailleferre, collectively known as Les Six.

It’s now almost exactly a century ago that Cocteau and the members of Les Six were frequent patrons of a famous Parisian nightclub called Le Bœuf sur le toit (The Ox on the Roof). There, on any given night, you might have bumped into luminaries such as Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, Cole Porter, Ernest Hemingway, Charlie Chaplin, and Maurice Chevalier. It’s fun to imagine the excitement of such a place, which stood at the intersection of everything innovative in the arts at the time. For the record, Le Bœuf sur le toit still exists (in the Eighth Arrondissement—not its original location), but only as a hoity-toity restaurant minus the avant-garde atmosphere. Listening to this CD is therefore an enjoyable way to imagine that you’ve traveled back in time to Cocteau’s watering hole and are hearing these pieces being performed for the first time.

With any compilation disc such as this, naturally the music is somewhat variable. The opening Rag-Time Parade of Satie didn’t quite do it for me; the piece lacks Satie’s characteristic edginess and iconoclasm, plus it seems to me that the composer doesn’t really understand the ragtime idiom. Much better is Stravinsky’s Ragtime—this should have been the opener. On the other hand, I was glad that the pianist elected to include Satie’s three Gnossiennes rather than his over-recorded Gymnopédies. Stravinsky’s Les Cinq doigts is the bane of beginning piano students, but it’s also surprisingly accessible, a monument to 20th-century Neoclassicism.

Much of the pleasure in auditioning this CD came in the discovery of new-to-me music. I confess that I’ve never heard the music of Georges Auric or Louis Durey until now (or if I did, it failed to make an impression). Both pieces, the Prélude of Auric and the Romance sans paroles of Durey, were memorable. In the brief space of two minutes, Milhaud’s Tango creates an exotic mood quite unlike that in any of his other music. In every piece that he wrote, Francis Poulenc’s effervescent personality comes bubbling through, and his brief, scintillating Valse is no exception. The four pieces by Germaine Tailleferre, one of two women composers on the program, reveal a remarkable musical mind capable of conjuring up the most fascinating musical structures.

The concluding work on the program, Rhona Clarke’s Cocteau, was commissioned by Isabelle O’Connell and premiered by her in 2023. Its six movements, “Antigone,” “Portrait I,” “Blood of a Poet,” “Orpheus,” “Portrait II,” and “Oedipus,” take their titles from specific works by Cocteau. The two “Portraits” were inspired by a self-portrait from 1962, a pencil drawing that reportedly reveals Cocteau’s deterioration due to opium drug addiction. (It would have been helpful to include a reproduction of this in the booklet.) The other four movements were inspired either by stage works (Antigoneand Oedipus, the latter an opera with music by Stravinsky) or by films (Blood of a Poet and Orphée). The dissonance level in this music ranges from mild to heavy, often with very little discernible tonal center. The mood is quite varied: dark and introspective in the two “Portraits,” but energetic and dramatic in “Blood of a Poet” and “Oedipus.” The latter, with its sweeping gestures and dense tone clusters, is the most challenging, both for the listener and for the pianist, and a fitting conclusion.

Isabelle O’Connell is an accomplished, sensitive pianist whose performances on this CD leave nothing to be desired. She is to be congratulated for putting together a unique, thought-provoking program (she is also listed as the producer). If this era of music interests you—as well it should, considering the fascinating musical personalities that emerged from it—then waste no time in procuring this disc. Warmly recommended.