When many of the musical byways of the first half of the 20th century are now explored so assiduously, it’s surprising that the music of Albert Roussel is heard less often than it was 30 years ago. Even his most celebrated orchestral works – the Third and Fourth Symphonies, the ballet scores The Spider’s Banquet and Bacchus and Ariadne – now rarely make it on to concert programmes outside his native France.
Born in 1869, Roussel was a late starter as a composer – he’d spent seven years as a midshipman before beginning his studies with Vincent d’Indy at the Schola Cantorum in Paris. His subsequent career fell into two distinct phases, with the first world war, when Roussel served as an ambulance driver, as the dividing line. If his early scores belong very much to the French tradition he’d inherited from D’Indy and expanded via the influence of Debussy, the later music has a more neoclassical feel, more Hindemith than Stravinsky perhaps, with lean, clear textures, crisp outlines and propulsiveness.
Of the three works that Yan Pascal Tortelier conducts on this disc, it’s the 1910 cantata Évocations, setting French translations of Sanskrit texts, for three soloists and a large chorus, that shows how much Roussel absorbed from Debussy, while the Suite in F, completed in 1926, belongs in a different world altogether. Between them the symphonic poem Pour Une Fête de Printemps (1920) seems very much a transitional work, though still obviously French. Tortelier is in his element in such music, and he consistently obtains playing of impressive refinement from the orchestra of which he used to be chief conductor, as well as bringing surging energy to the Suite’s motor rhythms.
Other classical music out this month
Meanwhile, Françios-Xavier Roth and Les Siècles have continued their exploration of the early 20th-century French repertoire, played on instruments from the same epoch, with two of Ravel’s orchestrations of his own keyboard works, Ma Mère l’Oye and Le Tombeau de Couperin, as well as the early Shéhérazade overture. It’s perhaps less revelatory than their earlier Ravel recording, but it’s still full of wonderfully deft, lucid textures; the sound of that early 20th-century French woodwind is especially evocative. And there’s a collection of works by Poulenc, played by the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, conducted with endearing stylishness by Jean-Luc Tingaud; it includes suites from two ballet scores, Les Biches and Les Animaux Modèles, as well as the Sinfonietta.
