Though he was born in Belgium, César Franck was based in Paris for almost all of his adult life. His pupils included Duparc, Chausson and d’Indy, while both Debussy and Ravel built on his fusion of the French and Austro-German traditions, and so Franck has a good claim to have been the most influential French composer of the 19th century. Yet these days his reputation rests on a handful of pieces and, outside France at least, only his single symphony is part of the regular orchestral repertoire. Certainly, performances of any of his five symphonic poems are rare, but Jean-Luc Tingaud’s selection of three of them is a reminder of what a vivid and effective orchestral composer Franck could be, even if there are moments in these performances when you sense that a genuinely top-class orchestra might make the music dance and sparkle even more than the RSNO manages to.
The best-known of the three poems is Le Chasseur Maudit (the Cursed Hunter), based on a German ballad; structurally and dramatically it’s the most convincing of them, too, compressing the four-part narrative into less than 15 minutes of music, in which the influence of Wagner is ever present but never obtrusive. The earlier Les Éolides is a delicate, almost balletic evocation of the classical Greek daughters of the wind, full of pastel orchestral effects that resurface (along with some of its musical ideas) in Franck’s last symphonic poem, Psyché, a retelling of the story of Psyche and Eros that was completed in 1887, just before the D minor Symphony. It’s easily the most substantial of the three here, cast in eight scenes lasting almost 50 minutes and requiring a chorus as well as a large orchestra. If the music doesn’t always justify the scale and the forces involved, the best of it, as so often in Franck, is very fine indeed.
This week’s other pick
Although the Symphony in D minor is the main work on Franck by Franck, Finnish conductor Mikko Franck’s disc of his namesake’s music with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France for Alpha, it also includes the earliest of the symphonic poems as a substantial fill-up. Ce Qu’on Entend Sur la Montagne is based on a poem by Victor Hugo; it was composed in 1846, predating all of Liszt’s symphonic poems, which are usually seen as the model for subsequent composers. It lasts almost half an hour, but although there are some striking ideas and passages of great textural beauty it does seem too long, though perhaps a more urgent performance than Franck’s might give it more coherence, for as in the symphony, he tends to opt for refinement over excitement.
