The symphonic poem came of age with the dozen or so examples that Liszt completed in the 1850s. The genre soon split into nationalist schools – Czech works by Smetana and Dvořák, Russian by Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov, German by Strauss and Schoenberg – and Bru Zane’s two-disc compilation provides a potted history of the genre in France, from César Franck to Lili Boulanger. Some of the 15 works included are concert staples – Franck’s Le Chasseur Maudit, Paul Dukas’ L’Apprenti Sorcier, Emmanuel Chabrier’s España, Camille Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre – but many of the other composers represented here are forgotten now.
Stylistically they are a highly varied bunch: there are still traces of Berlioz in Ernest Guiraud’s Ouverture d’Arteveld from 1874, for instance, while Boulanger’s D’un Matin de Printemps of 1918 brings together Debussy and early Stravinsky. There’s Debussy too in Mel Bonis’s rapturous Le Rêve de Cléopatre, but it’s Wagner who casts a shadow over Vincent d’Indy’s Istar, Henri Duparc’s beautiful Aux Étoiles, Augusta Holmès’s La Nuit et l’Amour and Ernest Chausson’s Arthurian Viviane. Meanwhile, Alfred Bruneau’s La Belle au Bois Dormant owes a clear debt to his teacher, Massenet.
The quality of the pieces is variable. Victorin Joncières’s La Toussaint and Henri Rabaud’s La Procession Nocturne, for instance, seem commonplace and dull. But there’s at least one real discovery here: Charlotte Sohy’s Danse Mystique is a gorgeously rhapsodic piece, sumptuously scored. It bears out the promise of the recordings of her music released by Bru Zane last year: Sohy is very much a composer to look out for.
Though there may be more brilliant recordings of pieces such as Danse Macabre, the general standard of the performances by the Lyon orchestra under their music director, Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider, is very high, beautifully coloured and richly textured, while the booklet that accompanies the discs is a splendidly comprehensive achievement in itself. It’s a thoroughly rewarding set all round.
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