EMI Classics pays a tribute to the poetic pianist by publishing the complete works of his recordings on thirty-six CDs, which are entirely remastered and enriched with numerous pieces that have never been heard to date.
Samson François’s career reached a peak in France that is difficult to imagine today. Although he was adored in Japan, admired in Russia, and in demand in the United States, Samson François never neglected the young French orchestras or tired of giving concerts in the provinces. Never since has a pianist been as popular as he was in France. And his extremely early death turned him into a legend.

Samson and sound

The success and reputation of the recordings of Samson Francois’s work naturally led EMI to digitise many of them in the early 1980s and put them on to CD. New generations of music-lovers were thus able to get to know and love this prodigious pianist, his freedom, and creative impulse. However, the technology available at the time often failed to render the sound quality of his playing, and music critics would often blame this on the sound-recording techniques. For this edition, the careful sound restoration of all the original recordings by the engineer-musicians of the Studio Art & Son, largely repairs this injustice. Several recordings that aficionados thought they knew by heart, in particular of the music of the three composers he played the most – Chopin, Ravel and Debussy, have been transformed.

Samson’s little heard-work

In 1995, EMI France published a first overall retrospective of Samson François’s recordings. The fortunate owners of that first edition should not despair: this new edition has been considerably enriched.
The many first-hand accounts of his concerts and the 78 rpm albums, which come largely from the Ina archives, fill as many as six CDs. There’s notably Bartók’s Third Concerto with David Zinman, which made a marked entrance into his discography, as do Franck’s Symphonic Variations with André Cluytens, which happily make up for its absence in Samson François’s official discography. Prokofiev’s Fifth with Lorin Maazel and Schumann’s Concerto with Munch put an end to the impression that Samson François worked with secondary orchestra conductors. Two recitals at the Salle Pleyel in Paris in 1964, where in all fairness the pianist played unevenly, but with breathtaking expressiveness, round off this box-set.