As the title indicates, this is a collection of French symphonic poems by female composers. It is an interesting concert, with 61 minutes of unjustly neglected music, superbly played and recorded.
Not everything here can be considered a lost masterpiece of course, but there is some wonderful music along the way. And it’s perhaps unfortunate (and unfair) that the only living composer of the bunch, Betsy Jolas, is given prominence on this production, as I found her piece the least substantive and musically creative among them. But I’ll get to that momentarily.
Let’s begin with Wagner. Oops – I mean Augusta Holmes. The brass opening of her Andromeda sounds for all the world like Mahler – and Franck (her teacher), with unmistakable hints of his The Accursed Huntsman, written the same year (1892). But the piece overwhelmingly sounds like Wagner. Not only musically (and in orchestration), but also length – it goes on for nearly 15 minutes. It is pleasant and rapturously tuneful – often sparkling in its brilliant orchestration. But the entire piece sounds curiously, persistently familiar – almost like deja vu. Not that that’s bad, it’s just not terribly individual or distinctive. But I enjoyed every minute of it.
Jump ahead 30+ years, and Lili Boulanger takes us from Wagner to the soundworld of Debussy. Her music is more delicate, more transparently scored, more harmonically exploratory, and more, well, Impressionistic.
The first of its two sections, “On A Spring Morning”, is refreshing after the solemn Holmes which precedes it. Full of color, it conjures up the crisp fresh air at dawn – sounding ever so much like Debussy’s La Mer. “On a Sad Evening” is sad indeed, but permeated by a palpable sense of doom. The 24-year-old Boulanger was well aware of her terminal illness (tuberculous) as she composed this, and that realization can be felt in the very essence of the music. (She died later that year, 1918, just 10 days before Debussy.)
If this music sounds familiar, that’s probably because these two pieces were originally written for Piano Trio and have been recorded several times – most recently by the Neave Trio on Chandos. The orchestrated version has also been recorded before – by JoAnn Falletta in 1992 for Koch – although, curiously, she reverses the usual order of them, starting with Sad and closing with Spring.
Next up are 3 symphonic poems by Mel (Melanie) Bonis. These were originally piano works and never published in her lifetime. They are based upon legendary females and were orchestrated while studying with Charles Koechlin in 1908-09. (There was a 4th one, Omphale, which was never finished).
These are descriptive – colorful and heady. “Cleopatre” occasionally brings to mind Richard Strauss and Szymanowski, flavored with the glittering orchestration of Rimsky-Korsakov. “Ophelie” is all Rimsky – the dramatic brooding of Le Coq d’or; while “Salome” is livelier and sensuous, with glimmers of Scheherazade.
Despite (or because of) their evocation of the rich orchestrations of Rimsky-Korsakov, these three by Bonis are arguably the highlights of the entire disc – expertly crafted, musically engaging and superbly orchestrated.
As a matter of fact, all three of these composers are brilliant at orchestration, which is probably the most salient characteristic of their music. It is brought vividly to life here by conductor David Reiland and the wonderful Orchestre National de Metz Grand Est (in Northeast France), aided by sumptuous recorded sound.
Finally we get to the “main attraction” of this program, the new work by Betsy Jolas. It was commissioned in 2016 by the Berlin Philharmonic after a meeting with its then conductor, Simon Rattle. Jolas explains in the booklet that the work is an homage to one of her favorite composers, Mussorgsky, and his Pictures at an Exhibition specifically. And similar to that famous work, its short sections (just 3 of them) are separated by little “strolling” interludes. But they are not based on a recurring theme and thus don’t hold the piece together like Mussorgsky does. And the three primary sections (“Knocks and clocks”, “Shakes and quakes”, “Chants and cheers”) are more clever than they are substantive, and are simply too short to make any kind of lasting impression. (Although the final section, which to my ear resembles neither chants or cheers, is somewhat reminiscent of Dutilleux, and roused my interest somewhat.) The entire piece lasts just 12 minutes and I wish there were more to it. Jolas obviously has talent, and the concept is novel. If only she had developed these sections into something more (and added a few more of them), this piece might have been more of a success. As it is, I found it slightly amateurish and not much more than a curiosity.
As to the production, it is surely one of the strangest I’ve seen. It comes in a thick, hardback book with a sleeve at the back for the CD. But with the extravagance of the sheer size of it, the booklet itself (in French and an English translation) is rather unwieldy and confusing. Its layout is jumbled and unorganized, and for all the pages it occupies, is surprisingly meager with in-depth information about the music or the composers.
Let me describe what we’ve got here.
Flipping to the middle where the English translation begins, we see 2 pages of printed text – a translation of a poem by Augusta Holmes, Andromeda, presumably on which her symphonic poem is based. (I say “presumably” because they don’t tell us what we’re reading or why.) There is no introduction to it or any reference to how it relates to any music on the program. It just … appears. Immediately after it, rather than going into the music associated with it, we instead read a commentary about whether or not it’s important to know if a piece of music is written by a woman or a man and whether that knowledge influences our enjoyment of it. The narrative quickly makes an abrupt segue to the origins of “program music” in French symphonic poems, without any further reference to the discourse raised in the previous page about gender. These seem to be just random thoughts expressed without cohesion or context.
Eventually they get to the music of the 4 composers pertinent to this recording (just a short, concise paragraph for each), followed by a little interview with Betsy Jolas, consisting of 3 succinct questions about her commission etc. Then the booklet goes back to discussing the composers again – but just 3 of the 4 of them (and in a completely different order from how they were discussed earlier) – providing a very brief musical background of each, but nothing more about Jolas. How odd. The final pages are adorned with some random photos of the recording session, closing with info about the conductor, the orchestra, and production details.
Fortunately, the recorded sound is excellent and the playing of the orchestra is superb. And there is some glorious music here, much of it musically rewarding – and remarkable, considering it is written by women, merely for the fact of its relative neglect. And in response to the question posed in the booklet about gender, no, that did not influence or affect my appreciation, understanding or enjoyment of this music. I considered this program based solely on its musical merit.
Finally, it’s interesting to compare this collection of mostly rare French orchestral music to a similar 2-CD set I reviewed earlier this year, Aux Etoiles, which offers considerably more of it. Two selections are duplicated: the shorter, happier of Boulanger’s pair (“Spring”), and one from Bonis’s trilogy, “Cleopatra”. In both, Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider in the earlier set adopts broader tempos than does Reiland. And in general, Znaider tends to bring out the symphonic grandness in all of the music on his set, while Reiland elicits more life, characterization and sparkle from his orchestra – and receives consistently superior recorded sound as well. Both collections are invaluable, but if I had to choose just one, it would be this later, single disc collection.
