“So dense, so many notes, so many double-stops. So hard to play in tune together, so tricky to balance and to make it sound natural.  But what special notes they are!”   

— Michiel Weidner, Prisma String Trio

In the latter part of his career, the French composer Florent Schmitt turned his attention to musical creations for chamber ensembles, including quartets and trios featuring instruments as diverse as flutes, saxophones and trombones.

The Pasquier Trio

More conventional but no less extraordinary in musicality were the String Trio and String Quartet that Schmitt composed during the 1940s.  The String Trio, Op. 105 was composed in 1944-45 and received its first performance in 1946 by the Pasquier Trio, made up of renowned siblings Jean, Pierre and Étienne Pasquier.  Reportedly, the musicians spent an entire year studying the score before premiering it.

Simply put, Florent Schmitt’s String Trio is an incredible composition — fascinating and complex.  It is a piece that demands concentrated listening, but the musical rewards are many.  As the American violinist and conductor John McLaughlin Williams has stated:

John McLaughlin Williams

“I find it interesting that Arnold Schönberg and Florent Schmitt have much in common in their mature works. The first used a system (more or less); the other went where his imagination took him — and yet musically they are not far apart at all. Listen to both of their late string trios and you’ll hear what I mean.”

The musicologist Eric Berman extols the virtues of the String Trio like this:

“The themes, the harmony, the rhythm, the counterpoint, the variations: All are dazzling for their richness and their perfection.”

Florent Schmitt dedicated his String Trio to the members of the Pasquier Trio, who premiered the piece and made the first recording.

Looking at the music, one is immediately struck by the copious number of notes (many of them 16ths and 32nds), that make this a big score close to 75 pages in length.

There are double-stops throughout all three parts, so that the piece often sounds more like a quartet or quintet than a trio. Moreover, the rhythmic complexity is noteworthy as well as the frequent time changes.

As for the harmony, the piece is rooted in tonality — yet polychromatic in the extreme.

In all, it’s a rich brew that poses supreme challenges in technical skill for any musicians who attempt to play this music.

First recording: Pasquier Trio (Pathé, 1946).

Perhaps because of its complexity, Florent Schmitt’s String Trio has been recorded commercially just two times.  The Pasquier Trio made a recording of the music the same year that it was premiered in recital (1946).  This premiere recording was released on the French Pathé label as a 4-disk 78-rpm set.

Unfortunately, the Pasquier recording has never been re-released in LP, CD or download form. But fortunately, we now have its vibrant performance available to hear on YouTube, courtesy of the endlessly interesting Shellackophile music channel.

Members of the Albert Roussel String Trio

The only other commercial recording of the String Trio was made in the 1980s by the Albert Roussel String Trio — an ensemble made up of violinist Eric Alberti, violist Pierre Llinares and cellist Georges Schwartz. Another fine performance, this was a short-lived LP release (on the Cybelia label) that has never been offered in CD or download form, either.

And then … silence for three decades until a plucky ensemble based in Amsterdam, the Prisma String Trio (PRISMA Strijktrio), discovered Florent Schmitt’s String Trio and decided to make it a musical “calling card.”

Prisma String Trio

Simply put, the members of the Prisma String Trio — violinist Janneke van Prooijen, violist Elisabeth Smalt and cellist Michiel Weidner — were more than captivated by the inventiveness of the music, even as they were determined to master its technical challenges.

In my research, I have been unable to identify any other ensemble in the world today that has the Schmitt String Trio in its repertoire.  So I reached out to the Prisma players to learn more about how they discovered this piece, and what makes the music so special for them.

Cellist Michiel Weidner generously agreed to the interview (which was conducted in English).  His insightful comments are presented below.

PLN: When did you first become acquainted with the music of Florent Schmitt?  Had any of you ever performed any music of his prior to the String Trio?

MW: For me personally, my first exposure to Florent Schmitt was in the 1970s when I was still in my teens.  The conductor of the Leiden Youth Chamber Orchestra, of which I was a member, was fond of excavating lost compositions and neglected composers.  He was eager to find music by Florent Schmitt for us to perform, but before he was able to find suitable music I had left Leiden (and the orchestra) to start my conservatory studies in Amsterdam.

Had there been an easily accessible source of information about Florent Schmitt and his works in those times, I might well have played his music before the age of 20.

PLN: How did you discover Schmitt’s String Trio?  What inspired you to investigate this particular piece of music, and then to perform it?

Michiel Weidner

MW: Towards the end of my conservatory studies I had formed a string trio ensemble.  We were looking for extra repertoire for an upcoming concert and discovered the Florent Schmitt Trio.

Unfortunately, we decided it was too difficult to master in the short time we had before the concert. Soon afterwards our trio fell apart, and then it took some 20 more years before our Prisma String Trio took up the challenge.

With Prisma, we had recently experienced success with the String Trio of Jean Cras — both in concert and on our first CD release in 2014 — and so we wanted to explore more French repertoire.

PLN: What were your first impressions of the music when you first began to study and rehearse it?

MW: When we played through the piece for the first time, I was thinking to myself, “My God, why did Schmitt write this music for a trio and not for a quartet or quintet?” So dense, so many notes, so many double-stops.  So hard to play in tune together, so tricky to balance and to make it sound natural. 

But what special notes they are!  

All three of us were delighted with the uniqueness and the musical qualities of the piece. We felt obliged to give it a try — but to be honest, I had my doubts that we would succeed! 

PLN: Thinking about each of the four movements of the String Trio, can you comment on each one and tell us what you find particularly noteworthy or perhaps unusual about it?  

MW: Overall, it strikes me that Schmitt uses very moderate descriptions to characterize the movements — phrases such as “sans excès,” “sans exagération” or simply “lent” — even while all the movements are quite extreme in character.  

Members of the Prisma String Trio

I think Schmitt does this on purpose — and it certainly helps to approach the music as any other music and not as something weird or experimental.

The first movement [Animé sans excès – 3/4 time] is maybe the most “festive” one. Schmitt manages to modulate almost every other bar and still tell a comprehensible story.   It is a bit like the works of Schönberg — but whereas Schönberg was searching for how far he could go inside the tonal environment, Schmitt seems to be using these frequent modulations as a way of coloring the music.  

It is, in my view, a bit like harmonic progressions in jazz music. I doubt if Schmitt thought about a tonal schedule beforehand; rather, it seems to me intuitive and spontaneous.  (Of course this is my notion as a musician; what a musicologist would say, I don’t know!) 

The second movement [Alerte sans exagération – 5/4 time] certainly swings. In the classical sense it is a dance movement, with the A-B-A form of a scherzo or minuet. It is light — with a twist due to the irregular and often changing time signature — and it is quite short compared to the epic first movement.

The third movement [Lent – 4/4 time] has a simple title, but this is hardly simple music. Harmonically, in form and in sound I would say it is somewhat like a short version of Schönberg’s Verklärte Nacht or Pelleas & Melisande — and equally beautiful.

The fourth movement [A l’allure d’une ronde animée – 9/8 time] is quite meaty for a last movement of a trio composition. It is also quite serious stuff for a rondo!  It’s quite a challenge for the players to keep up a playful mood while tussling with so many notes and dense harmonies at such a dazzling tempo!

PLN: When you were preparing this piece for performance, did you listen to either of the two commercial recordings of the music?  

MW: We did not.  It is our conception based only on exploring the score.  

PLN: Florent Schmitt’s compositions are known for being challenging ones.  How long did you work on preparing the String Trio for performance?  

Splendor Amsterdam

MW: We decided to take an entire year to master the music, and we were also fortunate to have the opportunity to perform at a special venue called Splendor Amsterdam.  This is a place run by 50 adventurous musicians, and it is our “home” stage.  

At Splendor, we could perform each single movement of the Trio for a small but engaged audience and receive valuable feedback each time, which was especially worthwhile for a work as challenging as this one.   

As I mentioned earlier, sometimes one wonders why Florent Schmitt didn’t write a quartet or even a quintet with these same notes. The real challenge is to play it like a genuine string trio — that is, to find the lightness and the openness, to give every voice sufficient attention and space, and to make those special moments emerge and shine.   

That is why we were so happy to study the music in different stages — each time adding an extra movement, and each time gaining more confidence. After a year of building, we presented our first complete performance of the Trio. 

PLN: Tell us about that first performance.  What was the audience reaction?

MW: Listeners were overwhelmed — even flabbergasted — at the fullness of the sound, the passion in the music, and also the music’s warmth.  We heard no comments from anyone about being unable to “connect” with the music or finding it difficult to comprehend. 

Indeed, some highly informed and musically astute members of the audience were absolutely astonished that they had never heard this music before — and generally were quite unaware of the quality and beauty of Florent Schmitt’s music.

PLN: Do you consider this String Trio to be an important one among the repertoire of 20th century string trios?  In what ways do you see it as a particularly significant piece?

MW: This trio is a true bridge between French and German musical style.  It has characteristics of both styles, but at the same time it also possesses its own completely authentic style.  

It’s very individual, indeed — and “nicely stubborn,” one could say!

PLN: Please tell us about the Prisma String Trio.  When was it formed, and what is its mission?

Janneke van Prooijen

MW: We started our trio in 2002. String trio ensemble is a special chamber music formation — very cohesive yet “solistic” at the same time.  In contrast to a string quartet, there is always light and air between the voices.  

One of the aims of our trio is to see how far we can go beyond the usual borders of classical chamber music. Alongside the “golden oldies” like Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, we perform an extensive amount of new music and unknown or neglected music — so long as it is good music!  

In our repertoire, we cover all musical styles from the 1600s to contemporary, and we also try to incorporate some of our own arrangements as well as non-classical works in our programs.  

Like most performing groups, we continually face an environment where it is difficult to convince programmers to allow us to include unknown composers or pieces.

But whenever we have the chance to play it, it is never difficult to convince audiences of the worth of that unknown music.  It’s why we consider this a special mission of the Prisma String Trio. 

PLN: Is the Schmitt composition representative of the kind of repertoire the Prisma String Trio focuses on in concerts?

MW: As Schmitt’s Trio very fine music, and at the same time neglected and thus unknown, it fits our repertoire like a glove. 

PLN: Had the three of you worked together as musicians prior to forming the Trio?  

MW: Yes, we worked together in different ensembles, varying from chamber orchestras to gypsy bands.  It is how we came to recognize each others’ strengths as musicians, and discovered our shared beliefs about repertoire and programming.   

As for our musical activities outside of the Prisma String Trio, I play in the Amsterdam Sinfonietta which is a string orchestra, and I am also one of the 50 musicians of Splendor Amsterdam, a self-run music organization with 1,250 members. 

Beyond the cello, I am also a cimbalom player, which is an instrument best-known as part of Hungarian gypsy ensembles. I play the instrument mainly for classical music, although I confess that I love to play csardas music just for the fun of it, too! 

Janneke van Prooijen, our violinist, is very busy with a variety of performing groups in Holland. In addition to the Prisma Trio, she is first violinist of the Atlantic Trio as well as the Lunatree ensemble.  She has also performed as a soloist with ensembles all over the country.  Like me, her artistic interests range from classical and romantic to contemporary music in addition to jazz, pop and improvisation. 

Elisabeth Smalt

Elisabeth Smalt is our violist. In addition to being a highly active chamber musician, her interest in period performance led her to form the ensemble Eruditio Musica with fortepiano player Riko Fukuda. 

Elisabeth is also a member of the Brussels-based chamber group Ensemble Oxalys, which recorded works of Reger and Mahler recently.  She also plays experimental music using unusual tuning systems and instruments such as the viola d’amore and the “adapted viola” of Harry Partch.

PLN: What major plans or upcoming projects does the Prisma String Trio have at the moment?

Merijn Bisschops

MW: We are in the midst of a major tour in Holland — an audiovisual project of Merijn Bisschops, with projected photos of Icelandic landscapes accompanying his original composition Textures. 

In April we’re performing three concerts with the Dutch Vocal Ensemble in a program featuring contemporary vocal and instrumental music.

A French tour this summer is also taking shape.

PLN: Do you have plans for performing Florent Schmitt’s String Trio in the near future?  

MW: At the moment we have no fixed dates to perform the String Trio again, but our goal is to program the piece as often as we can.  And if there is ever a proper recording we make of it, we will certainly let you know!

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Hearing the remarks of Michiel Weidner, it is obvious that he and his fellow musicians are very passionate about the String Trio of Florent Schmitt.  As one of the few (the only?) ensembles active today who have studied and performed this work, here’s hoping that they will soon have the opportunity to give the Trio its first recording in more than 35 years.

The dramatic soprano, famous across the world for her Turandot and other signature operatic roles, sang the rapturous solo part in Florent Schmitt’s stunning choral work Psaume XLVII in 2001.

A sonic “experience”: Florent Schmitt’s Psalm 47.

Ask anyone who has attended a performance of Florent Schmitt’s exhilarating choral masterpiece Psaume XLVII, Op. 38, and they’ll tell you how impactful the piece is when heard live.

I’ve been fortunate enough to see the piece three times in concert — first in New York City with the American Symphony Orchestra, soprano Korliss Uecker and the Canticum Novum Festival Singers conducted by Leon Botstein (1997), and most recently in Krakow, Poland with soprano Ewa Biegas and the Krakow Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Jean-Luc Tingaud (2016).

Both of those were highly memorable performances. In between was another presentation of the Psalm done in 2001 — which might be the most impressive one of all.

One reason is because the piece was presented in the magnificent sanctuary of the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, performed by the Cathedral Choral Society and members of the National Symphony Orchestra conducted by J. Reilly Lewis.

There’s something about experiencing the Psalm in such a vaunted place, along with the Cathedral’s massive Æolian-Skinner pipe organ (ca. 1938), that eclipses even the most impressive concert hall experience.

Audrey Stottler (Photo: Stephen Lottman)

And there was another noteworthy aspect of the National Cathedral performance — the appearance of dramatic soprano Audrey Stottler singing the important middle section of the Psalm.  Miss Stottler’s soaring rendition of the solo part was stunning in its impact, leaving many members of the audience utterly amazed (and delighted) at what they were hearing.

The sweep of Miss Stottler’s performance was even more extraordinary when one considers that her participation was an unplanned event that came about with barely a week to spare.

I discovered this interesting fact when I had the chance to visit with Miss Stottler to ask her about her experience in singing this music.  Through a mixture of serendipity and luck, I found myself face to face with Miss Stottler at her voice studio in Minneapolis, Minnesota, 17 years after the 2001 National Cathedral concert that I had attended with my family.

In between two voice appointments, we spent an enjoyable hour and a half visiting about Miss Stottler’s career and the rare opportunity she had been given to sing one of the most impressive masterpieces in the choral repertoire. Highlights of that discussion are presented below.

PLN: It has been nearly two decades since you performed Florent Schmitt’s Psaume XLVII at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC. Do you recall how the opportunity to sing this music came about?

Audrey Stottler’s portrayal of the heroine in Giacomo Puccini’s opera Turandot at the Forbidden City in Beijing, China, where she was joined by conductor Zubin Mehta, was the subject of this documentary movie (1998).

AS: Indeed I do!  I was in Tokyo at the time, where I was performing Turandot on tour with Zubin Mehta and the Maggio Musicale Teatro Fiorentino Orchestra.  I was also performing a Verdi concert in Japan at that time with tenor Neil Shicoff.

One night at the hotel I received a FAX from my New York agents, Edgar Vincent and Pat Farrell, asking if I would be willing to perform this music. Apparently Sharon Sweet, who had once made a recording of the Psalm, had been booked to sing it, but for some reason she was unable to perform it. 

Asked if I would consider doing the program, I replied, “Well, I’d need to see the music first.” So the next day the music was FAXed and was sitting in my box when I returned to my hotel. 

I looked at what had been FAXed and thought to myself, “This is rather odd. It has no piano accompaniment.  I don’t know what anything will sound like underneath!” 

As it turned out, it was pages from the middle of the score where the soprano has her solo.  Not only that, it was just a blow-up of the soprano part alone, with no other music parts showing.  Of course, there were many empty measures with rests, and no metronome markings at all. 

All that, plus the fact that the performance was going to be happening in just a week.

So my reaction was, “I don’t really care to do this.”  But my agents were very convincing, and ultimately I decided to take the engagement.

PLN: So, what you’re saying is that you weren’t familiar with the music at all?

AS: Correct.  I had never heard of the piece — nor of the composer, for that matter.   

But I realized how dire the situation was. And as it turned out, I already had a performance scheduled right afterwards next door in the state of Virginia, so it turned out that I could leave Japan a little early and be able to handle both appearances.

PLN: When you first looked at the score, what were your initial thoughts?

AS: Well, it was very curious; I didn’t really know what to think!  Remember, this was in the days before YouTube or barely even the Internet.  All I had was just my solo part, without knowing the underlying choral or orchestral parts, or even having a piano reduction.  And of course, I had no recording I could listen to for reference, either. 

So, I found a piano in the hotel and played through the melodic lines that were on the sheets that I had, and started to become a little bit familiar with the music that way.

I was also counting the beats — there were many measures of rests — and working on the French lyrics, too. 

Mind you, this is quite an unusual situation for a singer. Usually we have future repertoire that we keep up with.  Even as we’re singing one opera, we have our répétiteur who helps familiarize us with other roles or solo parts that are coming up. 

Even when you’re on the road, you’re constantly studying and preparing your upcoming repertoire. While you’re singing Ballo, you’re working on Attila.  You could be singing Turandot while simultaneously preparing for a Handel concert. 

Typically, I would know what I’d be singing two years ahead of time — not two weeks.  It was just very unusual to have no advance warning at all. In fact, offhand I can recall just one other occasion where I was flown in on such short notice to sing two Verdi Requiems in Scandinavia.  But in that case I was already at least somewhat familiar with the music; not so with the Schmitt.

PLN: How would you go about preparing a piece like Psalm 47 for performance? Is there a particular routine that you follow — particularly when preparing unfamiliar music for the first time?

AS: Whatever routine I typically had wasn’t what I could follow in this instance.  I recall that the first time I came to the Cathedral, we met in the choir room.  It was just the conductor and choral director Reilly Lewis, the rehearsal pianist, and me.  We sang through just the middle part of the score.   

The Cathedral Choral Society concert program cover (2001).

It was only when I got to town that I was given a complete score for my reference. But I ended up not using it at all, because I had already marked up my pages from Japan. 

To this day, in my binder you’ll see my marked up pages, and behind them is a clean copy of the score without so much as a single pencil mark on it! 

The next day we had one dress rehearsal with all the musicians, and then we presented the one Sunday afternoon performance the day after that. 

I remember the conductor as being an incredibly nice man, and unfortunately it was the only time we ever worked together. I knew nothing about the Cathedral Choral Society Chorus — which was a very fine one — nor of the orchestral players, many of whom turned out to be members of the National Symphony Orchestra. 

Everyone was wonderful to work with.  No stress whatsoever, which was important considering the schedule we were working under.

PLN: Psaume XLVII has some particularly challenging choral writing, and the rhythm can also be a bit tricky in places. Moreover, singing in the French language can present challenges for American choruses.  Did you notice any particular problems of this kind?

The Cathedral Choral Society in concert at the Washington National Cathedral.

AS: I hadn’t been privy to the earlier rehearsals with the chorus or the orchestra; I had just the one dress rehearsal in the sanctuary.  When I arrived, everyone was already assembled, and we began.  I remember being very impressed at how tight everything sounded.  It was a big chorus, and in the venue of the National Cathedral with the big pipe organ, it sounded very impressive.

PLN: When I attended the concert, I marveled at how “big” a program it was — not only Schmitt’s Psalm but also Poulenc’s Gloria and the Saint-Saens Organ Symphony. The French ambassador was also in attendance, adding to the “gala” atmosphere of the concert, which I recall attracted a capacity crowd in a space that seats around 3,000 people.  Did you have similar feelings about the concert?

AS: It was definitely a big program.  And to end it with the Schmitt — that’s an equally big piece!   

To tell you the truth, I didn’t know the French ambassador was going to be there — except at the last moment just before I went on when someone mentioned it to me. I remember thinking, “Well, this is certainly interesting …”

The 2001 “big program,” inscribed by Audrey Stottler 17 years later.

PLN: The contemporary American composer Kenneth Fuchs has written these words about Schmitt’s composition:  “The Psalm is unusual for French music because it has such a big profile. Even Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, at its largest moments with chorus and orchestra at full throttle, doesn’t quite have the ‘hugeness’ of this piece.   The Psalm’s language is not Germanic, but the dimensions somehow are.” Does this characterization seem right to you?

AS: I understand what he is saying.  When I listen to the orchestration of the Psalm, I actually hear some Stravinsky in there.  But I also sense a Straussian sweep to it — a dramatic sweep.  If you have the right solo soprano voice — if that’s where the beauty of your voice lies — it is like glue; it will go right on the music. 

A later-career operatic role: Soprano Audrey Stottler in Ariadne auf Naxos by Richard Strauss (Royal Danish Theater, late 1990s).

This is why I loved singing the Psalm.  The French repertoire isn’t where I’d devoted by energies during my career, simply because of the size of my instrument.  On the other hand, my voice is a little unusual in that it is also Italianate; one could say that I was singing in the Italian wing with a Germanic drive to the voice. 

And of course, that combination was perfect for the Schmitt. 

I should say that I was very surprised when I stepped into the sanctuary for the dress rehearsal, because I honestly had no idea how the full production would sound — with that tone and that sweep. This is what made it so fun for me to sing, and so easy for me to respond to that big wave of sound.

PLN: You have starred in hundreds of musical productions all over the world — and this is but one concert — but do you happen to recall any particular aspect of this performance that sticks in your memory?

The Washington National Cathedral sanctuary, where Florent Schmitt’s Psalm 47 was presented in 2001.

AS: Well, up until you shared a recording of the performance with me just now, I had never heard myself sing it!  But now when I hear it after all these years, I can sense how I really felt during the performance.  It’s exactly how I teach my students today:  you have to feel what you are singing.  You have a sense of how you’re “making the music.” 

When I listened to my Psalm performance, I could viscerally feel what I was doing.  It’s a beautiful moment to relive.

PLN: Although Florent Schmitt wrote no operas, he was very partial to vocal music of all other kinds.  His output also included many art songs — all of which are obscure.  Do you think singers of today should investigate this repertoire?

AS: Yes, why not?  Especially if the other pieces are written as beautifully as the Psalm.  The soprano part in the Psalm is so very emotional, and it’s such a joy to sing.  Schmitt really seems to understand the voice.

PLN: You have had such an interesting career — both on the opera stage and in the concert hall.  As you mentioned, much of your artistic activity focused on Italian repertoire such as Verdi and Puccini, and later Germanic repertoire such as Richard Strauss.  I’m curious if there are other pieces of French music besides the Psalm that have been “calling cards” of yours?

AS: The Schmitt was unusual in that regard because French repertoire was never a major focus for me.  I did sing Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites, as well as prepared Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète for a Trieste production that never actually happened. 

The French ambassador’s residence in Washington, DC.

It’s amusing for me to recall that after the National Cathedral concert, the French ambassador and his wife hosted a reception for the conductor, the organist, the concertmaster and me at his residence. The ambassador spoke to me in French, and I had to admit to him that I couldn’t converse that way, but that I’d be happy to speak with him in Italian!  He smiled and replied that my French was wonderful in the Schmitt, and that he could understand every word of it.

PLN: After spending nearly 40 years on the stages of Europe, the Far East and the Americas, about a dozen years ago you retired and established a voice studio in Minneapolis.  Could you say a few words about your teaching activities and the types of students who come to you for voice training?

AS: For decades I was on the road nine months out of twelve.  For the last seven years of my stage career, my husband and I decided to move back to Minnesota for the sake of raising our children in a more family-friendly environment.  My husband, Jon Poppe, is also a Minnesota native.  A professional chef during our time in New York City, he was a sous chef at Maxim’s and later head chef at the Mayflower Hotel.  Here in the Twin Cities, he is retiring from the restaurant industry this year. 

Audrey Stottler, looking over the score of Florent Schmitt’s Psaume XLVII in her voice studio in Minneapolis, Minnesota (2018).

As for my teaching activities, my original plan was to establish an opera development program. Eventually I founded my own studio in the city of Minneapolis, where I offer a wide range of educational activities in addition to traditional voice coaching — things like audition classes, movement classes, diction, mise en scene, directing, and ensemble training. 

As for my students, they come from all over the region, the United States, and even the world. I teach anyone who wants to sing, ranging in age from 15 to 65.  My students include professional singers, pre-professionals, performance artists, and some who just love to sing as an avocation. 

I have several students who are transitioning from one voice range to another — baritone to tenor.  Three of my students are currently performing in Europe, plus I have a soprano who travels here from Japan for lessons. I have a young baritone in Kansas who has just qualified for the finals round in the MET’s Young Artist Development Program. 

I also do lessons and coaching over Skype for students who aren’t able to travel to Minneapolis. 

One of my more unique students is a performance artist whose professional name is Bengal Blue. He met me as a teenager, and still flies here from West Hollywood for lessons.  He composes his own music and is a brilliant creative talent. 

From these varied experiences, I’ve discovered that teaching is a wonderful activity. It’s hardly routine and it’s never boring!  With the demands of my teaching, I find that I have little time to serve on juries or to adjudicate vocal competitions.

I think initially, students came to me because of my reputation as a singer and stage artist. But today, people come to me because of my reputation as a teacher.  And that is very soul-satisfying to know.

PLN: Are there any additional observations you would like to make about Psaume XLVII and the opportunity you were given to perform it? 

AS: It was an unexpected opportunity — not just to discover music that I didn’t know before, but also to push myself to learn it under such unusual circumstances. 

I recall my undergraduate days at Concordia College, decades ago, where we were taught that the job of a singer is to serve the music. That makes sense in theory, but sometimes it’s difficult to carry out. 

Florent Schmitt, photographed a few years following the premiere performance of Psalm XLVII in Paris in 1906.

Of course, that challenge is much easier when the music is top-quality. With Schmitt, you can really trust that the composer placed the notes in the way that he did for very good reasons.  Each note is important, just as it is written.   

A good composer gives you all the clues you need to find your connection with the music — and once you find the association, that’s what makes the music come alive. This was exactly the experience I had with Florent Schmitt and Psalm 47.

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Speaking as one of the audience members who was bowled over that day in 2001 at the Washington National Cathedral, it is indeed fortunate that Audrey Stottler was able to step in and be part of the production. Here’s hoping that the audio documentation of that very special performance will be made available someday for music-lovers all over the world to hear and enjoy.

In the late 1980s the first and only commercial recording of Florent Schmitt’s intriguing composition Fonctionnaire MCMXII, Op. 74 was released on the Cybelia label, featuring the Rhenish State Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by James Lockhart.

The title page of Florent Schmitt’s original manuscript for Fonctionnaire MCMXII, dedicated to the conductor Paul Paray, who led the first performance of the work in 1924.

Schmitt published this symphonic picture 1923, and it received its premiere performance at the Lamoureux Concerts in 1924, conducted by Paul Paray. (Maestro Paray was also the score’s dedicatee.)

The composition’s subtitle gives us an additional clue as to the “inspiration” behind the score: Inaction in Music, and indeed, the music skewers the French government worker sector through the lens an indolent employee.

As musicologist Frédéric Decaune puts it, “It is the bureaucracy itself – the men of regulations – that Florent Schmitt makes to look completely foolish.”

Originally envisioned as music to accompany an artistic collaboration between French writer Charles Muller and artist Régis Gignoux – a film production that never came to be – Schmitt ended up creating a blistering musical portrait of the “parasitic civil servant.”  Throughout its 15-minute duration, we hear the “inactivity in music” in its portrayal of a day in the life of a government worker, who engages in such worthy pursuits as:

• Yawning and stretching for a long, long time
• Perfunctorily saluting the French flag in the office
• Eating
• Exclaiming that there’s beaucoup work to do … but then doing nary a thing at all
• Looking endlessly at the clock
• Eedling away on a trumpet to pass the time
• Falling asleep

It’s clear from the above scenario – and in the structure of his highly symbolic score that’s heavy on “episodics” and light on the full development of musical themes – that the composer had little respect, time or patience for the inefficiencies of French bureaucrats.

I had known this music – and its only commercial recording – for decades before discovering something quite intriguing about it. As it turns out, the music represents only one portion of Schmitt’s artistic creation.  The other is voiceover narration, which was intended for presenting in conjunction with the music.

“The talking musician”: Vincent Figuri

Indeed, it is the narrative that takes this composition from “good” to “great.” And we have the renowned French actor and narrator Vincent Figuri to thank for resurrecting the speaking part and making the first-ever recording of Fonctionnaire MCMXII that includes the text.

Moreover, Figuri acquired the rights to use the Lockhart recording, and he released the finished production in 2017 on his own Salamandre recording label.

Speaking about the new Figuri presentation, the American arts and music critic Steven Kruger puts it this way:

“It’s hilarious!  It sounds like [Aaron Copland’s] A Lincoln Portrait for the bureaucrat’s day!”

I can’t think of a better artist to bring forth Schmitt’s creation en pleine fleur than Vincent Figuri, who is so highly regarded for his efforts to bring classical music scores to life through his elegant narration skills.

Trained as a pianist and chamber musician, Figuri made the transition to acting and narration relatively early in his career. His diverse activities and projects have included much output in his native French tongue, while also working in other languages as well.  In so doing, Figuri has established an enviable reputation; he’s known to many as “the talking musician.”

Vincent Figuri in performance.

Recently, I had the opportunity to interview Vincent Figuri, asking him about his efforts to resurrect and record Florent Schmitt’s Fonctionnaire MCMXII.  Highlights of our discussion are presented below.  (Note: Mr. Figuri’s comments have been translated from French into English.)

PLN: How did you discover Fonctionnaire MCMXII? Were you introduced to this music by a fellow musician, or through your own research?

VF: I came across this work during my efforts to discover musical repertoire with narrative text.  As I recall, I found the score at Éditions Durand in the 1990s, when the publisher was still located in Asnières-sur Seine.  As you can see, this piece has been on my radar for a long time!

PLN: Before discovering Fonctionnaire, were you familiar with any other music by Florent Schmitt?

VF: I knew some of Schmitt’s music – but mainly through recordings, since the composer is played rather infrequently in concert or recital.  In particular, I knew some Schmitt piano recordings made by Pascal le Corre and Alain Raës. 

I think the only opportunity I’ve ever had to hear his music performed in public is Psaume XLVII.  Overall, his orchestral music is truly remarkable.

PLN: When you heard Schmitt’s music for the first time, what were your impressions?

VF: It was during my student years that I first discovered the Psaume.  This fresco is impressive without a doubt.  But I did not take spontaneously to many of Schmitt’s other compositions. 

In fact, it was more my curiosity about French music in general that led me to delve into Florent Schmitt’s works. Some of his scores attracted me immensely – particularly the works with literary subject matters and also his large orchestral pieces.  But other compositions passed by without leaving much of a footprint.

Regarding the Fonctionnaire in particular, I listened to this music even before having the score in hand.  And the recording was the purely orchestral treatment, so it didn’t tell me too much. 

But then I listened to the piece with the score, on which is printed the narration.  Suddenly I understood it all – how the narration really works with the music.

PLN: What were your first impressions of the scenario and the text when you read it?

VF: Immediately I saw how the music and the words were working together symbiotically.  The music alone didn’t convey all of that – something seemed to be missing.  Likewise, the text did not work on its own, either.  I realized that both the text and the music were needed in order to successfully convey Fonctionnaire MCMXII to listeners.

Indeed, I’ll go further than that: In my opinion, the piece is fully successful only when presented with the narration, because the music follows the storyline so faithfully. 

In that sense, Florent Schmitt has been very adept in matching his music with the argument. For this reason, both must be presented together to bring Schmitt’s vision to life and to pay proper tribute to his creation.

The James Lockhart recording of Fonctionnaire MCMXII on Cybelia (recorded in the late 1980s).

Of course, I also realized the challenge of preparing a narrated version of Fonctionnaire without having access to the one commercial recording [James Lockhart on Cybelia].  So this idea was something I was forced to table until I founded my own record label and sought to obtain the rights to use the Lockhart recording to produce a narrated version.

PLN: What modifications did you make to the text when preparing the narrated version of Fonctionnaire?

VF: Nine times out of ten, the original layout of text with music isn’t completely suitable for performance.  Few composers are fully adept at calibrating the flow of the spoken text overtop the notes.  Very often the text is arranged in a somewhat random fashion.  For example, the narrator should not be speaking overtop a solo cello or flute.  It’s important to place the text in very specific spots so that it doesn’t overpower or otherwise disturb the music.

Liszt and Stravinsky are exceptions in that they understood these aspects better than anyone.  In Schmitt’s case, I found that there were places where I needed to shift where I was speaking – but usually in small ways.

Another challenge happens when using a pre-existing recording, which I was doing in the case of Fonctionnaire.  The timing is dictated by the recording; if there is a silence of three seconds, you have only three seconds to speak.  Sometimes it works fine … but other times a phrase might need to be shortened, or repositioned elsewhere in the score.

So in approaching Fonctionnaire, I had to keep in mind the musical and textual logic.  The goal was to balance the two in ways that optimized the interpretation while remaining true to the composer’s intentions.

One other point I’ll add is that it’s important for the narrator’s voice not to “crush” the orchestra through amplification. In my view, the narrator is akin to being another instrument.  A soloist, yes – but still an instrument.  Therefore, I’m always working with my sound engineer to achieve the proper balance between the volume of the orchestra and the voice.

PLN: There are many places in the piece where the music perfectly describes the narration – and vice versa.  Do you have one or two favorite parts of the storytelling with the music?

The title page to the piano reduction score to Florent Schmitt’s Fonctionnaire MCMXII, published by Durand.

VF: I particularly like the point near the end of the piece when the tempo accelerates.  The orchestra expands and really carries the narration at this point.  The final pages of the score forced me to engage in extensive reworking in order to fit the narration into spots where the music would allow it to be heard. 

When doing this kind of work, it’s quite a challenge because it’s very important to speak “musically” – in other words, to blend in with the nuances of the score.

Here’s an interesting aside: the Lockhart recording hadn’t included the tolling of the bell when the clock strikes 4 o’clock, so it fell to my audio engineer to add that sound effect!

PLN: What do you know about the original production of Fonctionnaire MCMXII? Do you know how it was presented the first time – with or without the narration?

VF: It is my understanding that the original tableau was developed for a film that was never shot – and it’s too bad that never happened!  For this reason, I suspect that it wasn’t performed with the text; maybe it hasn’t ever been up until now.

PLN: The Lockhart recording of Fonctionnaire MCMXII is more than 30 years old. How did you secure permission to use this recording in producing your narrated version?

VF: I undertook a judicial investigation.  It lasted several years, but I finally discovered that the original tapes had never been bought by anyone else — so that’s what I did.

PLN: How can music-lovers acquire your new recording of Fonctionnaire?

VF: At present, it is available in download form only.  There is no CD version available – at least not yet.

PLN: Preparing this new narrated version of Fonctionnaire MCMXII is part of a broader objective of yours to promote great French repertoire of this kind. Probably the most famous French example of music with narration is Claude Debussy’s Le Martyre de saint Sébastien. What can you tell us about your efforts to promote this body of work — and which pieces beyond these ones by Debussy and Schmitt?

Vincent Figuri recording the narration to Florent Schmitt’s Fonctionnaire MCMXII (July 2017).

VF: French music is at the heart of my interests.  But this repertoire with narration is vast – expanding well beyond France – and nearly all of it is little known to the general public. 

I have discovered many interesting works – and some of them like the Schmitt are really first-rate.  In this sense I’d say that the French repertoire is honorable, but there are even more pieces in other national repertoires, including the German and Czech.  There are some impressive melodramas by composers like Sibelius and Richard Strauss that are truly great works.

When approaching this repertoire, the question of translation always comes up. In my view, if we wish to promote these works, then we must be willing to translate them without worrying about the question of “authenticity.”  Fortunately, in narration there aren’t the same challenges one might face in lieder or other vocal music in that there are far fewer rhythmic constraints. 

For this reason, why deprive ourselves of the opportunity to offer these creations to a wider public?  I like to reference Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf as an example.  The composer himself created the text for that piece – in Russian.  But why should we hear it only in Russian?  If we are broadminded in this respect, there will be a bigger market for other pieces as well.

PLN: You have had a noteworthy career working as an actor/narrator in the realm of classical music.  In fact, you are known as “the talking musician.”  How did your career evolve in this highly specialized niche?

VF: I am a musician – pianist and chamber music – by training, but I also practiced drama.  One day I learned of Liszt’s melodramas.  Upon investigating those, I fell in love with them – and everything started from there.

I don’t think things could have evolved the opposite way. Had I been an actor first, I would not have had the courage to study music to then work in this sort of repertoire.

PLN: What projects are you working on at present?

Salamandre Productions, Vincent Figuri’s recording label, was founded in 2012.

VF: I founded my Salamandre Productions recording label in 2012 in order to record many of my projects.  Right now I am working on two recording projects featuring unpublished works of French composers.  However, I’m choosing to keep the details under wraps until things are further along in development.  We shall keep the surprise a secret for a while longer!

PLN: Personally, I find listening to your narrations to be a beautiful experience – as do other people I know.  In fact, several non-Francophone music-lovers tell me that they enjoy hearing the sound of your voice even though they do not understand the words you’re saying.  Do you work in languages other than French, too?

VF: I have always loved languages.  I am well-familiar with Italian, German and even a little Russian.  But it’s important to recognize that if the sung voice conceals the linguistic imperfections of the performer, the voice of the actor puts them bare!

I do like challenges, and I’ve even worked with languages such as Swedish and Hungarian. In addition, with my Salamandre label I’ve worked to widen the circle of listeners for the musical tales of Dvořák and Prokofiev by recording them in several different languages.

I’m a great believer that narration can help usher people more easily into the world of classical music. To that end, I’ve been involved with a UNESCO project recording musical tales in six different languages.

For me, I’m always keen on hearing how singers are treating language when performing or recording operas and lieder. Even if I do not know the language, I’m always sensitive to the diction of the singers.  Listening to some singers today, at times it makes me quite unhappy!

PLN: In conclusion, do you have any additional comments you’d like to make about Florent Schmitt and his artistry?

Florent Schmitt, photographed at about the time he composed Fonctionnaire MCMXII in 1923.

VF: There’s no question that Florent Schmitt is a composer who deserves a much higher position than he occupies today in the French musical landscape, where some people are more concerned about judging some unfortunate words he had to say during the Second World War than they are about his very inventive music. 

Fortunately, the world is far larger than merely France – and Americans are here to talk about him as well!

_____________________________

Vincent Figuri’s recording of Fonctionnaire MCMXII is available to hear in Schmitt’s original version with spoken voice. You can also follow along with the score here, reading the devastatingly satirical narrative that accompanies the music.

For those who wish to acquire the Lockhart/Figuri recording in high-resolution audio, the music can be downloaded from various online vendors, including here and here and here.

We owe a debt of gratitude to Vincent Figuri for resurrecting the “fullest picture” of Fonctionnaire MCMXII and giving the world such an effective presentation of the score’s many winsome moments.  We look forward to learning more about his upcoming projects, too – particularly the ones featuring unpublished French scores that combine music and the spoken word.

Florent Schmitt seated at the piano in his study. This photo dates from 1937, two years following the creation of his Trois danses for solo piano. (©Boris Lipnitzki/Roger-Viollet)

Florent Schmitt’s two instruments were the flute and the piano. Arguably the piano was the one he preferred most — at least based on the quantity of music he created — for within the catalogue of Schmitt’s compositions are vast swaths of music written for the piano solo, piano duet and duo.

The large majority of these compositions appeared earlier in Schmitt’s musical career — from 1890 to the early 1920s. But Schmitt’s middle and later period would also produce a number of important solo piano scores — notably these four sets:

• Trois danses, Op. 86 (1935)
• Chaine brisée, Op. 87 (1937)
• Small Gestures, Op. 92 (1940)
• Enfants, Op. 94 (1941)

Among them, the Trois danses, Op. 86 is particularly interesting.  This set of pieces explores different dance styles down through the centuries.  Schmitt dedicated each of the movements to notable French pianists of the time.

Composed in 1935 and published by Durand the following year, the three movements in the set are as follows:

I.  Monferrine: Subtitled Bourrée lombarde, this movement is based on a folk dance from the Piedmont region of Northern Italy, which appears to have originated in the second half of the 18th century. The monferrina is a three-part dance similar to a tarantella.  Schmitt dedicated this first movement to the famed French pianist Marguerite Long (1874-1966).

II.  Bocane: This movement is named after a social dance of the early Baroque period. Popular during the period 1580-1655, it is similar in form to a courante.  Interestingly, the inventor of the bocane was Jacques Cordier, a dancing master to Queen Anne of Austria and numerous other European noblewomen.  Cordier has been described as “absolutely illiterate — and even ignorant of music.”  His physique wasn’t much better — gouty and crook-shanked, with distorted hand and foot features.  Despite these infirmities, he was prized for his violin playing and his ability to compose “charming airs.”  Indeed, in addition to the bocane, Cordier is credited with creating the pavane dance style.  Florent Schmitt dedicated this movement of the set to the pianist and teacher Lucette Descaves (1906-1993).

III.  Danse de corde:  The final movement of Trois danses translates roughly in English as a “rope dance” — although I cannot find any specific reference to this particular dance type.  To my ears it has the feel of a passepied, a brisk minuet popular in the 17th and 18 centuries — but one with considerably more “bite and abandon.”  Schmitt dedicated this movement to Hélène Pignari, a pianist who was later to become famous for her concertizing and recording collaborations with the violinist Louis Kaufman.

The original Véga LP release (1957).

For a number of years following their composition, the movements of the Trois danses were the solo piano pieces of Schmitt’s performed the most often.  In 1957, the pianist Françoise Gobet would make the first — and to-date only — commercial recording of the music.

It is a fine, idiomatic reading from a consummate musical artist who studied under Marguerite Long, Jean Doyen and Fernand Oubradous. Born in 1929, Mme. Gobet made her professional debut at the Paris Exposition of 1937.  She has been associated with contemporary music throughout her career, championing in particular the works of Jacques Ibert and Henry Barraud.

Françoise Gobet

Released on the Véga label, Mme. Gobet’s recording of Schmitt’s Trois danses shared billing with piano music by four other French contemporary composers (Georges Auric, Claude Delvincourt, André Jolivet and Jean Rivier).

Long out of print, for decades the Véga LP was one of the most elusive of rare recordings. But in 2011, the industrious French-based Forgotten Records label prepared a digital remastering using a mint-condition LP pressing — thereby making the recording available to the public for the first time in nearly 40+ years.

The Forgotten Records CD reissue (2001).

I own a copy of the original Véga LP as well as the Forgotten Records CD reissue, so I can attest to the fine quality of the transfer. The CD rendition can be ordered easily from the Forgotten Records website.

These days, Trois danses no longer holds the distinction of being Schmitt’s most frequently performed solo piano work.  And yet, considering its inspiration, inventiveness and appeal, there’s no reason why pianists of today shouldn’t investigate this music and introduce it to a new generation of music-lovers.

Paul Paray (1886-1979) premiered more orchestral works of Florent Schmitt than any other conductor. Trois dances was first performed in 1939.

What’s more, this score was also orchestrated by the composer — just as Schmitt would do with many of his other piano suites.

In early 1939, the orchestral version of Trois danses was premiered by the Colonne Concerts Orchestra under the direction of Paul Paray.  It would be quite interesting to hear the music in that form as well.

The international Bachtrack website is in the process of uploading its global database of classical music programs for the upcoming season.

Although it isn’t an exhaustive listing of every professional group, the site covers nearly all of the major orchestras, opera and ballet companies around the world, making it the “go-to” resource for information about what’s happening on the classical music calendar.  (Having one of the most robust and easy-to-use search mechanisms of any website of its kind is an added plus.)

The 2018/19 season is just now coming into focus – and we see that four important compositions of Florent Schmitt will be presented by orchestras in Buffalo, Norfolk and Québec City, conducted by JoAnn Falletta and Fabien Gabel.

It’s a bit of a twist this season — in that North America will be experiencing the majority of Schmitt concerts — and it may be the first time when Europe doesn’t represent the largest share of musical activity.  Of course, it’s early days yet and I’m quite sure that more European concerts will come to light.

Several of the events are particularly notable. The Buffalo Philharmonic pieces will be recorded by NAXOS (including one commercial recording premiere), while the Virginia Symphony Orchestra presentation of Antoine et Cléopâtre will feature actors from Shakespeare’s Globe in London performing a dramatic adaptation of Schmitt’s music in conjunction with a “filleted” version of the Bard’s drama.

And for those North Americans who would like to partake in a rare opportunity to experience Schmitt’s blockbuster choral masterpiece Psaume XLVII live, the Québec City performance promises to be a gala occasion, featuring MET opera star Lisette Oropesa and the OSQ Orchestra + Chorus along with a gathering of arts dignitaries — complete with red-carpet runway.

Listed below are details on the upcoming season’s concerts, along with links for more information about the performances and to reserve tickets.

June 9-10, 2018

Schmitt: Antoine et Cléopâtre, Suite No. 2, Op. 69b  (1920)

Debussy:  Khamma

D’Indy: Istar

Ravel: Shéhérazade

Roussel: Padmâvatî, Suite No. 2

Orchestre de Paris, Fabien Gabel, conductor

Measha Brueggergosman, soprano

________________________________________

March 2-3, 2019

Schmitt: Musique sur l’eau, Op. 33 (1898/1911)

Schmitt:  La Tragédie de Salomé, Op. 50  (1907/10)

Brahms: Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 77

Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, JoAnn Falletta, conductor

Susan Platts, mezzo-soprano

Buffalo Girlchoir

Sarah Chang, violinist

(Schmitt selections being recorded for release on the NAXOS label)

_________________________________________

May 17-19, 2019

Schmitt: Antoine et Cléopâtre: Suites Nos. 1 & 2, Op. 69 (1920)

(Dramatic adaptation by Bill Barclay)

Virginia Symphony Orchestra, JoAnn Falletta, conductor

Actors of Shakespeare’s Globe (London)

Bill Barclay, director

(Virginia Arts Festival Production)

_________________________________________

May 29, 2019

Schmitt: Psaume XLVII, Op. 38  (1904)

Berlioz: Roméo et Juliette, Op. 17 (selections)

Berlioz: Tristia, Op. 18

Debussy: Claire de lune

Thomas: Hamlet: Ophélie’s Scene and Aria (Mad Scene)

Orchestre Symphonique de Québec, Fabien Gabel, conductor

Lisette Oropesa, soprano

Chœur de l’OSQ

_______________________________________

More information on these upcoming concerts can be found on the Bachtrack site, or on the web pages of the six orchestras (click or tap on the orchestra names above).

In the coming weeks, it is likely that additional concerts featuring Florent Schmitt’s music will be announced for the upcoming season. They will be added to the listing above as soon as the information becomes available.

Paul Paray (1886-1979)

Music history tells us that the French conductor Paul Paray (1886-1979) gave more first performances of Florent Schmitt’s compositions than any other director.

Indeed, Maestro Paray premiered nearly a dozen of the composer’s creations spanning more than a quarter-century, including the following works:

• Trois rapsodies, Op. 53, January 29, 1928
• Cinq motets, Op. 60, January 21, 1934
• In Memoriam, Op. 72, November 3, 1935
• Fonctionnaire MCMXII, Op. 74, January 16, 1924
• Danse d’Abisag, Op. 75 (concert hall version), January 24, 1926
• Kermesse-Valse, Op. 80, April 4, 1936
• Six Choeurs for Female Voices & Orchestra, Op. 81, February 19, 1933
• Trois Danses, Op. 86, February 18, 1939
• Suite sans esprit de suite, Op. 88, January 29, 1938
• Introït, récit et congé for Cello & Orchestra, Op. 113, December 16, 1951
• Scènes de la vie moyenne, Op. 124, October 2, 1950

But perhaps an even bigger contribution to the musical legacy of Florent Schmitt was Paul Paray’s advocacy for what is arguably the composer’s most famous creation, the ballet La Tragédie de Salomé.

The interior of the Théâtre des Arts (now named Théâtre Hebertot), where Schmitt’s ballet was first mounted in 1907.

Composed in 1907 as a nearly hour-long “mimed drama,” the production featured Loïe Fuller, an American-born dancer famous for her scarves and lighting effects, portraying Salome in a series of seven tableaux.

Presented at the intimate Théâtre des Arts in Paris, the performance space necessitated utilizing a small orchestral ensemble of only around 20 musicians, with the proceedings directed by a then-very-young Désiré-Émilie Inghelbrecht.

Several years later Schmitt revised Salomé, cutting its length by half while substantially augmenting the orchestration in the best post-Rimsky tradition — in the process creating one of the finest “orientalist” scores ever penned.

Igor Stravinsky and Florent Schmitt, photographed in about 1910.

The new version, which Schmitt dedicated to Igor Stravinsky, was premiered as an orchestral suite in 1911 by composer-conductor Gabriel Pierné, even as it continued to be presented as a stage work featuring such famed prima ballerinas as Natalia (Natasha) Trouhanova (1912), Tamara Karsavina (1913) and Ida Rubinstein (1919).

Villa Medici, Rome

Paul Paray, who was Schmitt’s junior by 16 years, was likewise a recipient of the Prix de Rome first prize for composition (Schmitt won in 1901 for his cantata Sémiramis … Paray in 1911 for his cantata Yanitza).  Beginning in the late ‘teens, Paray migrated into orchestral conducting, although he would continue to compose until the late 1930s; among his compositions are several very fine symphonies.

La Tragédie de Salomé was one of the scores that Paray began conducting in the 1920s, and it was a work he would keep in his repertoire throughout his extraordinarily long career.

Early on, Paray directed the leading French orchestras in performing Salome, including the Concerts Colonne (where he was the orchestra’s music director) as well as the Concerts Lamoureux.

But it was in the post-World War II period when Paul Paray’s championing of Salomé would arguably have its greatest impact.  When the maestro came to America in the early 1950s to join the newly reorganized Detroit Symphony Orchestra as music director, he brought varied French repertoire with him that immediately began appearing on DSO concert programs – not only the “usual” works by Debussy and Ravel but also compositions by Chausson, Franck, Saint-Saens, Lalo, Roussel and others.

Florent Schmitt’s La Tragédie de Salomé was one of these pieces.

It didn’t take long for Paray to become recognized throughout the United States for his nonpareil interpretations of the French repertoire, due in part to an extraordinary set of recordings he made with the Detroit Symphony for the Mercury Living Presence label beginning in 1952.  Mercury was one of the most enterprising classical record labels active at the time; its recordings were brilliant, and the sonics along with Paray’s artistic interpretations were nearly universally praised by critics.

A common description of Paray’s approach to French repertoire was this:  While other conductors treated the music like an oil painting, Paray treated it like a watercolor.

Paul Paray takes Florent Schmitt’s La Tragédie de Salomé on the road: Pittsburgh Symphony concerts (1952).

It’s an apt analogy – and it helps explain why Paray’s recorded legacy on Mercury continues to be prized by music collectors so many decades after the pieces were recorded.

Importantly, Paray took his beloved French repertoire on tour as well – with the DSO and also in his guest-conducting appearances spanning the country from New York City to San Francisco. No Paray concert program was complete without containing at least one French work. La Tragédie de Salomé appeared on Paray’s programs – very likely for the first time in the United States since the pre-war days of Dmitri Mitropoulos in New York and Désiré Defauw in Chicago during the 1940s.

The 1958 Mercury recording of Florent Schmit’s La Tragédie de Salomé (U.S. release).

In March 1958, Paul Paray and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra made the first stereophonic recording of Schmitt’s ballet for the Mercury Living Presence label. At this point, the DSO had been “his” orchestra for six years, and the precision ensemble exhibited on the recording surely demonstrates it.

Nearly contemporaneously, Schmitt’s composition had been recorded in Paris the year before by EMI’s French subsidiary Pathé-Marconi – a performance led by conductor Pierre Dervaux that was made in the presence of the 87-year-old composer.

The Mercury recording came to market in fall 1958; thus Paray was able to visit an ailing Schmitt at his home in St-Cloud to personally present the new recording to him. It turned out to be the last time the two musicians would meet, as the composer passed away just a few weeks later.

The 1957 EMI recording, made in the presence of the composer.

The Dervaux and Paray recordings were the first ones made of La Tragédie de Salomé in the LP era, but the Dervaux performance wasn’t recorded in stereo, nor was it ever released internationally.  As a result, the EMI recording is not widely known, although it was uploaded to YouTube recently on Philippe Louis’ fine music channel and can be heard here.

By contrast, the Mercury recording was given distribution all over the world – not only in North America but also in European releases (France, England, Germany and elsewhere), as well as in South America and Japan.

The recording was well-received by aficionados of French classical music, not only for Paray’s vital interpretation but also for the polished orchestral ensemble and the audiophile sound quality. In 1960, it received the prestigious Grand Prix du Disque award – one of two such prizes awarded to Paray recordings among the nearly 60 that he made with the Mercury label between 1952 and 1962. The recording has been uploaded to YouTube and can be heard here (accessible to U.S. viewers only, unfortunately).

Back in print: The CD reissue from the early 1990s.

For a period of time in the 1970s and 1980s the Paray recording was unavailable. But it was re-released in the early 1990s and has remained in print ever since.  It continues to win critical accolades – including on a 2017 Radio-France program where it was judged the best of six well-known recordings of Salomé (the other contenders being the recordings by Sylvain Cambreling, Thierry Fischer, Jean Martinon, Marek Janowski and Yan-Pascal Tortelier).

The panel of judges, made up of leading French music critics Séverine Garnier, Emmanuelle Giuliani and Christian Merlin, summarized its evaluation of the Paray recording as follows:

“In sparkling sound, this recording exults in the jewels of Florent Schmitt’s score.  Following a moiré-colored Prélude, the Danse des perles is playful, menacing, and iridescent in its opalescent hues.  The Enchantments sur la mer is full of color, followed by a Dionysian Danse des éclairs and the concluding Danse de l’effroi.  A magnificent sense of the story is conveyed in this recording, which emerges as the essential one for anyone discovering this masterpiece for the first time.”

Paul Paray would continue to program La Tragédie de Salomé long after retiring from his music directorship in Detroit.  Later presentations of the piece included ones with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo (which Paray took on a North American tour with the orchestra in March-April 1966), as well as a 1971 ORTF performance as part of that year’s “Festival de musique française” which was broadcast over Radio-France.

That ORTF performance is available to hear today, and it reveals some subtle changes in the then-85-year-old Paray’s interpretation of the score as compared to his 1958 commercial recording.  The lusty cheers of the audience at the conclusion of the piece offer further proof of the dynamism that the conductor always brought to this music.

Stéphane Denève

Paul Paray’s popularization of the Salomé score also appears to have had an impact on the conductors of today who are advocates for Florent Schmitt’s music.  When French conductor Stéphane Denève came to Canada in 2011 to present La Tragédie de Salomé at the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, I had the opportunity to ask him how he came to know the music.  His reply: “It was from Paul Paray’s recording.”

Fabien Gabel

Another Schmitt über-enthusiast, Orchestre Symphonique de Québec music director Fabien Gabel, spoke in an interview several years ago about how Paray’s Mercury recording was in his highly musical family’s extensive record collection when he was a child (Gabel’s father played trumpet at the Paris Opéra for nearly 40 years and his mother is a well-known harp player). The music had a big impact on Maestro Gabel then – and sparked a career-long interest in the composer as a result.

JoAnn Falletta

… And the next commercial recording planned of Schmitt’s masterpiece is scheduled to be made in 2019 by JoAnn Falletta and her Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, for the NAXOS label. She too draws inspiration from the same sources, noting:

“While my entry into the fascinating musical universe of Florent Schmitt was through his Antony & Cleopatra – which I adore – I have always wanted to undertake his Tragedy of Salome, too. For that reason, I’m delighted to have the opportunity to perform and record it next season. 

Schmitt’s connection to Paul Paray is very meaningful to me as well. I remember my teacher, Sixten Ehrling, telling me that no conductor could present French repertoire better than Maestro Paray, who had been his predecessor in Detroit.  Ehrling added that when he conducted French music with the Detroit Symphony, he would never change even the slightest detail of what the musicians were playing, because they represented Paray’s own interpretations so deeply embedded within them.”

I’m quite sure that a goodly number of other conductors who are presenting La Tragédie de Salomé today – Kasuyoshi Akiyama, Alain Altinoglu, Lionel Bringuier, Sylvain Cambreling, Paul Daniel, Jonathan Darlington, Sascha Goetzel, Ira Levin, Thomas Loewenheim, Daniel Myssyk, John Neschling, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Eckart Preu, Gottfried Rabl, Lan Shui, Yan-Pascal Tortelier and Pascal Verrot among them – have likewise found inspiration from Paul Paray’s vital and vibrant conception of this remarkable music.

Plus, with the 150^th anniversary of Florent Schmitt’s birth coming up in 2020, I have no doubt that even more conductors will see fit to study and program this extraordinary score for the benefit of music-lovers around the world.

American cellist Aaron Merritt and French arts administrator Eric Butruille traveled to the Philharmonie in Paris for the June 2018 event and were interviewed immediately thereafter.

On June 9th and 10th, 2018, the Orchestre de Paris presented a program that must rank as one of the most interesting concerts of this year’s artistic season in the city. Themed Rêves d’Orient, the concert consisted of works by five French composers — d’Indy, Debussy, Roussel, Schmitt and Ravel — each of the pieces based on “orientalist” storylines:

• Vincent d’Indy: Istar (1893) (Persia)
• Maurice Ravel: Shéhérazade (1904) (Arabia) … featuring soprano soloist Measha Brueggergosman)
• Claude Debussy: Khamma (1912) (Egypt) … orchestrated by Charles Koechlin
• Florent Schmitt: Antoine et Cléopâtre Suite No. 2 (1920) (Egypt)
• Albert Roussel: Padmâvatî Suite No. 2 (1923) (India)

Fabien Gabel

The program was the brainchild of Orchestre de Paris guest conductor Fabien Gabel, working in concert with the orchestra’s délégué artistique (artistic producer) Edouard Foure Caul-Futy. As it turned out, the majority of the concert consisted of rarities that had never been programmed in the Orchestre de Paris’ 50-year history.

Philharmonie de Paris

The well-publicized concert was a success, drawing nearly 6,000 people to three performances held over the weekend.

One novel aspect of the concert experience was removing the seats from the main floor of the Philharmonie’s Grand Salle Pierre Boulez and replacing them with plush oriental carpets.  This clever marketing tactic provided a relaxed and intimate ambiance wholly suited to the exoticism of the musical scores being presented.

The concert was also a personal triumph for conductor Fabien Gabel, who has established a worldwide reputation as one of the biggest advocates of French music dating from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Indeed, he has programmed the music of all five of these composers with his own Orchestre Symphonique de Québec as well as with other orchestras throughout the world.

As regular readers of the Florent Schmitt Website + Blog know, Maestro Gabel is a particular champion of the music of Florent Schmitt — and yet these Paris performances of the Antony & Cleopatra Suite #2 were “firsts” for him as well as for the orchestra.

In post-concert correspondence with the maestro, he was effusive in his praise of the Orchestre de Paris musicians, noting:

“What was amazing was the high quality of the playing in the concerts. Antoine et Cléopâtre is extremely difficult music to play for each musician, and the quality of every solo was simply stunning.  Listening to a live feed of the concert is impressive, and I think that the Parisian players were clearly inspired. What I can also report is that the audience was blown away by the Schmitt, too — not just the musicians.”  

Fabien Gabel rehearsing the Orchestre de Paris prior to the Rêves d’Orient concerts (June 2018).

The programming was novel enough to attract visitors from far afield. Two acquaintances of mine made the journey from out of town to take in the June 9th concert — Eric Butruille, an arts administrator from Lyon (France) and Aaron Merritt, an orchestral musician and cello instructor from Miami, Florida (USA).

Following the concert, both gentlemen were kind enough to share their observations about the event and the music that was presented, with particular focus on the second suite of Antony & Cleopatra.  The insights of these gentlemen make for interesting reading and give us a sense of what it was like to experience these rarities in a live concert setting.  Highlights from the discussion are presented below.

PLN: Were you familiar with Florent Schmitt’s Antoine et Cléopâtre music before you attended this Orchestre de Paris concert?

Aaron Merritt:  I’ve long known who Florent Schmitt was — vaguely — but my real discovery of the composer happened earlier this year.  I came to him via Richard Strauss’s opera Salome [1905].  After seeing that opera for the seventh or eighth time, I began to wonder how other composers had treated the biblical tale of Salome in their works.  I was aware of Schmitt’s nearly contemporaneous ballet La Tragédie de Salomé [1907], but finally sat down to give it a focused listen.

And I’m glad that I did! I was so enchanted by the music that I decided to seek out his “famous” works and found the Florent Schmitt Blog. Antoine et Cléopâtre was one of the first works I had the opportunity to explore, and I was totally bowled over by the beauty, the creativity and color of this music — the same way that I had been with La Tragédie de Salomé.

Eric Butruille:  As for me, I had listened to the Antony & Cleopatra music some years ago, but I can’t really say I was very familiar with it.  As a matter of fact, I had heard all of these works before, but not recently and not ever in a concert setting.  Unlike Aaron’s preparation, I made it a point to not listen to them before the concert, so as to have a “fresh ear” for rediscovery of these pieces.

PLN: What were your overall impressions of the music — and of the Orchestre de Paris performance of it?

The Orchestre de Paris’ Rêves d’Orient concert program, presented at the Philharmonie de Paris on June 9-10, 2018. Fabien Gabel conducted.

Aaron Merritt:  When I decided to make the trip to Paris after finding out about this concert, I downloaded scores of the works which were going to be presented (coincidentally, I had already purchased a score for d’Indy’s Istar a few months before finding out about the concert).  I did some light studying, so my impressions of the music were pretty much formed going into this concert.

But hearing Antoine et Cléopâtre live reaffirmed the brilliance and complexity of the score — especially in the wonderfully live and resonant acoustic of the Paris Philharmonie.  The color, detail, ebullience, and virtuosity were remarkable throughout.

I’m probably among a very small group of people in the audience who actually knew all five works fairly well — but I think everyone who was truly listening must have been captivated from the very first moments of the Suite.

Eric Butruille:  I felt that this carefully-built program proved the “viability” of all of these works and composers in the concert hall — and the necessity to program them far more often.  My only slight disappointment was with the Padmâvatî Suite which, isolated from its operatic context, proved not very representative of Roussel’s art and craftsmanship.  That item might have been better replaced by Dukas’ La Péri, for example, or perhaps the dances from Henri Rabaud’s opera Mârouf, savetier du Caire.

PLN: What are your observations about the three movements of Schmitt’s Antony & Cleopatra Suite #2? What aspects of each movement did you find particularly noteworthy or memorable?

Eric Butruille:  I felt that each movement of the suite had links to some of Schmitt’s more well-known works — pieces like La Tragédie de Salomé, the violin passage in Psaume XLVII before the soprano solo’s entrance, and Dionysiaques — that one particularly in comparison with the second movement of the Suite.

Aaron Merritt:  Again, what struck me most was the color, brilliance, and virtuosity of Schmitt’s music.  No doubt the entire program was a challenge for the musicians, but it’s obvious that the Schmitt was the most involved piece presented — as well as the lengthiest.

There were some standout moments. The first few evocative and exotically perfumed celesta notes and underlying string tremolo of “Nuit au palais de la reine” really set the scene.  The delicacy in the oboe and English horn melodies successfully painted the picture of exoticism and orientalism — actually more convincingly than anything else presented during the evening (perhaps with the exception of some dark and austere moments in Roussel’s second suite from Padmâvatî). In the fine acoustic of the Grand Salle Pierre Boulez, this was delightful and very special.

In the second movement, “Orgie et danses,” I was really struck by the clarity and power of the first big brass “refrain,” the physical animation and fearlessness of the violins in their difficult “random” runs, as well as the clarity and precision of the mallets and celesta. It was quite exciting to watch all seven percussionists having quite the party at the back of the stage!

I also really loved the color of the string solos toward the end of this movement.  As an orchestral player myself, I was really struck by how tight the ensemble was.  It’s such a virtuoso work — with so many independent lines in a score unfamiliar to the musicians — but I could tell that everyone was really plugged in, listening and playing so generously.

In the final movement, “Le Tombeau de Cléopâtre,” I loved the texture the orchestra produced in the early and sparse “footstep” section in the horns and basses.  There’s an offbeat echo which was done with such subtlety that you had to really pay attention to figure out who were playing the off-beats.  The stillness and mysteriousness were so very convincing.

PLN: Antoine et Cléopâtre was part of a concert devoted to “orientalism” that featured sumptuous musical scores by Roussel, d’Indy, Debussy/Koechlin and Ravel in addition to Schmitt — pieces composed within a 30-year period between 1895 and 1925.  Based on what you experienced, do you think the concert was an artistic success?

Aaron Merritt:  It was a remarkable success.  Even though I came in with a lot of forethought and familiarity with the music, I was not let down in any way.  Adding to the experience, a unique atmosphere was created in the hall by the removal of the floor seats; instead, concertgoers sat or reclined on Persian rugs.

It had the casualness of an afternoon at a Parisian park or attending an outdoor concert. Couples were nestled and being affectionate; it made it seem very bohemian.  I actually think it made people listen more attentively and open up their imagination!

Oriental carpets line the main floor of the Paris Philharmonie’s Grand Salle Pierre Boulez as concert-goers begin to arrive for the Saturday evening event (June 9, 2018).

I suspect there were some people who had come to the concert specifically to hear this niche program, as I had done.  But it seemed that the entire audience was very attentive and enthusiastic about what they were hearing.  I wonder if a program like this would have been as convincing — or as successful — had it been mounted in the United States? 

Eric Butruille:  I’d say it was definitely an artistic success — and a commercial one as well, probably. The house was pretty full, which is amazing for such an original program.  It shows that there is an audience out there that is curious to explore little-known works.  That group of people isn’t as large as the audience for “big standards,” of course, but with a fresh and different marketing approach it is possible to reach it.

On a more personal level, not only did the concert fulfill my own expectations, I had brought a friend with me who enjoys classical music but who doesn’t attend symphony concerts very often. He was very impressed and happy with what he heard, and it gave him an incentive to “learn to listen” to music he wasn’t familiar with at all.  He was particularly receptive to the subtleties in the music, as well as the moods conjured up in the Khamma and Antony & Cleopatra selections.

PLN: What struck you as common threads or similarities between the various pieces that were performed?

Eric Butruille:  That’s an interesting question, because I think the program actually showed the diversity of the “orientalist” inspirations of that period more than it did the similarities!

Aaron Merritt:  It’s obvious that this set of pieces belonged together in that they were all French interpretations of the “exotic,” referencing unfamiliar places and times.  And all of them exhibited brilliance and subtlety in their orchestration.

But I found myself surprised at their differences, too. For example, I left the concert thinking that the Ravel Shéhérazade was very perfect in its simplicity — almost to a fault — and that the Debussy Khamma was the most “direct” music.  These are the opposite opinions from what I would ordinarily think:  Debussy being direct?!

Earlier in the week I had visited the Musee d’Orsay, where there was a small exhibit of French orientalist paintings. Having the opportunity to compare the creations of artists like Delanoy, du Noüy, Dinet and Cabanel was an experience that helped to engage my mindset for this concert, contemplating the fascination of the “unknown” lands and atmospheres illustrated in the paintings and other artistic works.

PLN: In what ways did Florent Schmitt’s piece differ from the other compositions presented in the concert?

Aaron Merritt:  It seems to me that Schmitt’s Suite had the most diversity of color, style and detail — and it also came across as having the clearest narrative or programmatic function of the five works.

Ida Rubinstein as Istar (costume by Léon Bakst).

That being said, d’Indy’s Istar came across brilliantly, too.  Being a set of variations, Istar has inherent diversity in its construction, but it seems like an improvisation or a dream to the listener.

The Padmâvatî Second Suite by Roussel, while being extracted by the composer from an opera, was a little shorter. It conveyed a feeling of mystery and darkness throughout; to me, that particular work comes across as more vague in mood and detail.

Charles Koechlin’s orchestration of Khamma is absolutely spectacular; there was a propulsion and menacing energy throughout the presentation of this piece.  This ballet music felt way shorter than it actually is!

The only piece of the five that I had performed or seen live in concert before this weekend was Ravel’s Shéhérazade.  While I love Ravel and think that every one of his works is near-perfection, compared to the other works on the program the simplicity, delicacy, and transparency made this particular piece seem almost like a palate cleanser between courses!

I would say that even though all five pieces were “medium-sized” (versus a more standard overture-concerto-symphony concert program format), Schmitt’s piece came off as being the “main event.” Not only was it the longest work on the program, it had the most diversity and the biggest moments.

Also, even though all five works require subtlety and intensive preparation, I suspect that Schmitt’s composition was almost certainly the most difficult one to prepare.

PLN: How did the audience respond to the concert — and to the Florent Schmitt piece in particular?

Eric Butruille:  Actually, I think most of the audience members were flabbergasted at the quality of the music the vast majority of them were discovering for the first time.  Now, my front-row neighbor was obviously aware of the Schmitt piece given his head movements following the rhythms, but I’d wager that most people were discovering repertoire completely unknown to them — and quite enjoying it.

Maud Allan, the Canadian-American actress and choreographer who commissioned Debussy’s Khamma, never had the opportunity to star in it.

Aaron Merritt:  The reaction to the concert overall was great.  I think that the audience responded most favorably to the Schmitt and the Debussy/Koechlin pieces that made up the second half of the program, and there was prolonged applause at the end of the concert.

Intermission at the Orchestre de Paris’ Rêves d’Orient concert (June 2018).

PLN: Fabien Gabel is a strong advocate for French music from this period — particularly lesser performed scores by composers like d’Indy, Schmitt, Roussel and others.  During his pre-concert talk, were there any comments he made that you found particularly interesting and worth sharing?

Eric Butruille:  Maestro Gabel explained the creation process of the pieces on the program, and I learned a lot from his presentation.  He spoke with obvious passion about these works, and about putting this program together with the producer of the Orchestre de Paris.

Edouard Foure Caul-Futy, Délégué Artistique of the Orchestre de Paris.

I managed to speak a few words with both gentlemen, congratulating them for producing this concert but also mentioning about the responsibility of programmers to change the negative paradigm of presenting only well-familiar works. They acknowledged that changes were needed, but with a practical eye towards the “mercantile needs” to fill the house.  I’m happy to report that the Orchestre de Paris’ producer is committed to learning from this programming experimentation, and to keep it going in future seasons.

Aaron Merritt:  Unfortunately I am not fluent in French, plus I was a little late to the talk (I had come from a chamber music concert elsewhere in the building featuring music of Roussel, Jean Cras and Marcel Tournier, that went a little long).  But one thing I picked up on was that Maestro Gabel categorizes Schmitt’s orchestration capabilities on par with the acknowledged greats — composers like Rimsky-Korsakov, Ravel and Mahler (or at least this is what I think he was saying).

Maestro also talked about how he tries to sneak these rarely-performed works onto concert programs along with more well-known repertoire like Mozart and Berlioz, in order to avoid scaring away concert-goers who are unfamiliar with the pieces — realizing that it is often a tough sell to get audiences to try something new. 

Conductor Fabien Gabel acknowledges the ovation of the audience at the conclusion of the Orchestre de Paris’ Rêves d’Orient concert (June 9, 2018).

PLN: Both of you traveled a goodly distance to attend this event.  Based on how the concert went, are you glad that you made the journey?

Aaron Merritt:  Absolutely!  For me, it was the ideal opportunity to book my first-ever trip to Paris.  My cello teaching was wrapped up for the season and I had no orchestral concerts planned that week.  If it had been just to experience one of the pieces in concert, I wouldn’t have booked a trip around it.  But the “special event” for me was the complete program, since four out of the five pieces are hardly ever (or never) performed in the United States. 

Eric Butruille: I am a little different from Aaron in that I don’t really have a “home base” these days and I had already planned to be in Paris during this period. But I can definitely say that it was very rewarding to have had the opportunity to attend this concert!

PLN: To people who are unfamiliar with the music of Florent Schmitt, what compositions in addition to Antoine et Cléopâtre would you recommend that they explore?

Eric Butruille:  For people who aren’t familiar with Schmitt’s music, I’d recommend that they start with the “three biggies” which provide a nice traversal of the composer’s inspiration, language and style: La Tragédie de Salomé, Psaume XLVII and Dionysiaques.  After that, in many of Schmitt’s other orchestral and choral works they they’ll listen to, they’ll find musical linkages to these pieces.

Florent Schmitt, photographed at about the time he composed Antony & Cleopatra (1920).

Aaron Merritt:  I’m still exploring the riches of the Schmitt catalogue myself, but my favorite works so far are La Tragédie de Salomé, the Symphony #2 [1957] (with the most glorious slow movement — I can’t get beyond how beautifully Schmitt constructs and colors a “stream of consciousness” into a delightful and poetic arc, so full of unexpected turns of phrase), the Sonate libre for violin and piano [1919], and the crazy-impressive cello piece Introït, récit et congé [1948]. 

PLN: Are there any final observations you would like to share about Florent Schmitt and his music?

Eric Butruille:  We need to convince great musicians, conductors and orchestras to program Schmitt’s music in the concert hall.  Indeed, Psaume XLVII and Salomé should be programmed as often as Mahler 8 or Ravel’s Boléro.

But that’s far from the case, up to now. To illustrate, during Maestro Gabel’s pre-concert talk I was absolutely appalled to hear that some of the composers or pieces on the program were having their Orchestre de Paris débuts at that concert.  To think that such composers had never been presented before by a major French orchestra like the Orchestre de Paris is more than scandalous — and it says a lot about the inexcusable lack of interest in defense of patrimoine français.

It would be like a major German orchestra performing only Beethoven, Brahms and Schumann (in France, Berlioz, Debussy and Ravel) and disregarding all the others.

We also need to reach additional well-known conductors who have a very special relationship with their audiences and who can, in turn, convince programmers to include Florent Schmitt in their programs. I’m thinking of people like Kent Nagano, Gustavo Dudamel and Kirill Petrenko at the Berlin Philharmonic.

Yannick Nézet-Séguin has already recorded one of the best versions of La Tragédie de Salomé, but unfortunately for a small label.  Perhaps he could convince Deutsche Grammophon to record a new Psaume XLVII at the highest level of artistic and technical quality.  (I deeply regret that Renée Fleming was never offered an opportunity to record that work, but it might not be too late …!)

Cleopatra (painting by Hans Makart)

Aaron Merritt:  Schmitt’s music is full of surprising colors, unexpected moments, and rhythmic complexity. The orchestrations are top-notch, with many layers and lots of subtlety.  Some pieces are somewhat quirky and therefore not as immediately accessible, but there are definitely other compositions like Antoine et Cléopâtre and La Tragédie de Salomé that function very well as starting points for new listeners. Both of these orientalist works are great gateways to the very special sonic world that is uniquely Schmitt’s own.

_____________________

As the comments of Messrs. Butruille and Merritt amply show, the Rêves d’Orient event at Philharmonie Hall in Paris was a very special presentation that was well-worth experiencing.  Moreover, the concert was recorded and will be broadcast over the Internet by France-Musique later this year (August 2, 2018).

Happily, those who weren’t able to travel to Paris in June will be able to hear the concert in all its glory. The broadcast performance will remain accessible on the France-Musique website for several months following the August 2nd air date.  You owe it to yourself to give it a listen.

Speaking about the future prospects of this kind of repertoire appearing in the concert hall, Fabien Gabel had this to say:

“The management of the Orchestre de Paris is aware that they need play this repertoire and other music like it. Alexandre Dratwicki from the Bru-Zane Foundation — an organization that was a key supporter of this concert — recognizes the same thing.  He and others are pushing for all the radio orchestras in France to perform more of this repertoire, so I’m optimistic!”

Korliss Uecker

One of the most memorable highlights of my concert-going life was hearing Florent Schmitt’s stunning choral masterpiece Psaume XLVII, Op. 38 presented at Lincoln Center in New York City. Although I was well-familiar with the piece, having discovered it several decades earlier, this was the first opportunity I’d had to see it performed live in concert.

Like Maurice Ravel’s characterization of the premiere performance of this music in Paris back in 1906, I found the New York performance “profound and powerful.” The performers that day included the American Symphony Orchestra and the Canticum Novum Festival Singers conducted by ASO music director Leon Botstein.  And the important soprano solo part was sung by soprano Korliss Uecker, who at the time appeared regularly in roles at the MET Opera.

Like many a MET Opera soloist, Miss Uecker’s career has encompassed many productions featuring varied languages and composers ranging from Mozart, Verdi and Smetana to Humperdinck and Richard Strauss. In more recent times she has been a recital artist concertizing in the United States and Europe, as well as starring as soloist in some of the great symphonic and choral works in the repertoire.  She is a champion of women composers and contemporary American music, and her musical activities also extend to cabaret, jazz and American musical theatre.

When I saw the Lincoln Center performance of Psalm 47, I was deeply moved by Miss Uecker’s breathtaking solo passages soaring high above the orchestra — and also wowed by her highly attractive stage presence. In short, it was a stellar presentation that has remained a fresh memory ever since.

The refectory at Shattuck-St. Mary’s School (Faribault, MN), where I met Korliss Uecker for a (very) early morning interview.

Fast-forward to June 2018 … and I had the good fortune to meet Miss Uecker and visit with her about her experience in singing Florent Schmitt’s Psaume.

Even though we reside in different states on the East Coast, this past June we found ourselves just a few miles apart in the state of Minnesota, where I was visiting family and Miss Uecker was participating as a faculty member in the Collaborative Piano Institute’s annual program being held at Shattuck-St. Mary’s School in Faribault.

Because of scheduling necessities, Miss Uecker and I ended up meeting at 7:00 am for our interview (she remarked that this was the earliest interview she’d ever granted to anyone!).  Despite the extreme early hour and the lack of morning coffee, we spent an engaging 90 minutes together, reminiscing about the 1997 concert and her interesting career activities since then.  Highlights of the conversation are presented below.

PLN: It’s been quite a while since you performed Florent Schmitt’s Psaume XLVII at Lincoln Center in New York City. Do you recall how the opportunity to sing this music came about?

Leon Botstein

KU: Leon Botstein, music director of the American Symphony Orchestra who had decided to program the Psalm, was looking for a soprano solo for the piece. I had not heard of Florent Schmitt until I received a call from Leon’s office to come in for an interview and an audition.   

I did some quick research on the composer, but was unable to become very familiar with the Psalm 47 solo part because Leon had wanted to see me in four days. So I sang passages from the Brahms Requiem which have a similar arching high line, and I think I also sang the Poulenc song Ce …, which also has that very high arching line (plus it’s also French).  

And then I was hired, and the work of preparation began.

PLN: To many people, Schmitt’s Psalm 47 is a surprising discovery.  They are amazed that such an impressive choral piece is so little known and so rarely performed.  What was your initial reaction to the music when you became acquainted with it?

KU: When I got hold of the score, I was totally blown away by it.  To tell you the truth, I was kind of overwhelmed by the enormity of it all — it’s such a big piece with the chorus and organ and all.  But I was very excited as well. 

PLN: How would you go about preparing a piece like Psalm 47 for performance? Is there a particular routine that you follow — especially when preparing unfamiliar music for the first time?

Conversing with soprano Korliss Uecker about preparing and performing Florent Schmitt’s Psalm XLVII.

KU: Typically, I get together with pianists who are good at working with orchestral scores so that they can provide a kind of “big picture” view of the music.  In the case of the Schmitt, I also checked my French with Mme. Marguerite Meyerowitz from Juilliard who had remained my French coach since my days as a student there, just to make sure there wasn’t anything unusual or peculiar with the Biblical text.   

After that, I sat at the piano and started learning my part note by note and phrase by phrase.  

I don’t recall that I had a recording of the Psalm when I prepared for the concert. Today, thanks to YouTube, it’s more common for people to listen to other performances.  While there’s a risk that you might not retain your own personal interpretation of the music, it is a great aid. 

But I encourage people to try to get their own sense of the poetry and music in a room by themselves, seeing what their own reaction to the piece is before listening to others.  The danger is losing your own individuality in the process of hearing other singers. 

As for the Psalm, I didn’t have trouble learning it, but I do recall that the cueing was very complicated during rehearsal and in the performance, because Leon had so much to do with cueing the orchestral and choral entrances. It isn’t easy music — certainly not as easy as a Mozart or Fauré Requiem or something more straightforward like that. And Schmitt’s musical writing is very thick; the texture is very rich.   

The vocal parts for Florent Schmitt’s Psaume XLVII, inscribed by soprano soloist Korliss Uecker.

Also, we didn’t have a lot of rehearsal time available — one full rehearsal and then a final run-through in Fisher Hall [now David Geffen Hall]. I do remember that I took the concertmaster aside — Eric Wyrick — and asked him, “Leon’s so busy — how would you feel about giving me a cue here or there?”  I didn’t really want to bother Leon because he was already cueing left and right.   

Eric was kind enough to give me a couple of special cues which were very helpful during the performance — just to double-check where I was coming in and to make sure it was spot-on. There was so much going on and it was very challenging being in the middle of that sound.  I was in the front of the orchestra but the sound was all around me.  It isn’t like an opera stage where the orchestra and conductor are in the pit, facing the performers. 

Some of the entrances for the soprano and for the chorus aren’t always that “obvious” in this piece. I was a little surprised at that because of the period when the music was written.  But then again, you never know — after all, with someone like Debussy anything goes, and Debussy and Schmitt were working in the same time in France. 

Korliss Uecker celebrating with husband Jerry Grossman at an event honoring him as the longest-held principal cello chair in MET Opera history (Lincoln Center, April 2018).

One other thing I discovered when preparing this piece was that there were tremendous Schmitt fans around. My husband, Jerry Grossman, is principal of the cello section in the MET Opera Orchestra.  There was a fellow cellist in the MET Orchestra at the time — Sam Magill — who was just “on” this.  He was so excited that I was singing the Psalm.

Samuel Magill

Not only was Sam there for the performance, during the entire run-up to the concert he was constantly asking me how things were going with the preparation. He and others seemed so genuinely excited that this piece was being programmed — and that I was the one doing it.

PLN: The contemporary American composer Kenneth Fuchs has written this about Schmitt’s composition:  “The Psalm’s language is not Germanic, but the dimensions somehow are.” Does this characterization seem “on point” to you?

Kenneth Fuchs

KU: It’s interesting that you bring up Ken Fuchs, because I’ve known Ken going back to my days at Juilliard.  In some ways I would agree with his perspective on this piece, but actually I can think of some Germanic comparisons.   

I wouldn’t say something Wagnerian, but perhaps it’s somewhat like Korngold. Die Tote Stadt-ish: a big colorful orchestra with soaring lines for everyone.   

Maybe Richard Strauss, too.  But it’s not a tonality comparison; it’s more the busy activity within the orchestra and all the inner voices. 

PLN: What do you think of the “big profile” of this piece?  Are there stylistic elements that appeal to you most especially?

KU: I love the profile of the Psalm.  Indeed, the scope of it is gigantic.  It was very exciting to be at the epicenter of such a massive and expressive piece of music. 

It felt to me like it was operatic — like when I did Ariadne auf Naxos in concert with Wolfgang Sawallisch and the Philadelphia Orchestra — as compared to when I sing something like Mozart’s Exsultate jubilate which is crisp and clean, where I’m the soloist here and the orchestra is there.  

Recently I sang in the Mahler Resurrection Symphony, and that had somewhat of a similar feeling to me.

PLN: For some listeners, the middle section of the Psalm with the soprano solo is the emotional high-point of the piece rather than the two outer sections — even with all of their power.  What is it like to sing those solo passages? 

KU: Those passages are quite exhilarating because of their sweep and expressiveness.  They were actually quite easy for me because they set very well within the range of my voice.   

I loved the experience of singing the piece; I would love to sing it again.

PLN: Singing in the French language can present challenges for American choruses.  Did you notice any particular problems of this kind when rehearsing the Psalm?

KU: The chorus was very well prepared and top-quality, including the French diction.  It’s likely the chorus was comprised of many Juilliard and MSM [Manhattan School of Music] graduates, so the talent level was high as it invariably is in New York City.  

I’m not sure how the French would have sounded had the piece been performed outside of New York!

The ASO program, inscribed by soprano Korliss Uecker when we finally met this year.

PLN: ASO music director Leon Botstein, who conducted your performance, is known as a champion of lesser-known repertoire.  In fact, your concert shared billing with music by two other rarely performed French composers: Vincent d’Indy and Albéric Magnard.  Have the two of you collaborated on other projects since then? 

KU: I loved working with Leon and I would like to work with him again.  Unfortunately we haven’t done any projects together since the Schmitt, although recently I did suggest to him a piece by Lowell Liebermann titled Six Songs of Nelly Sachs.  It’s a piece I premiered in 1986 with the pianist David Korevaar, and later presented the version with orchestra.  It’s one of several Liebermann work’s I’ve premiered, including an opera, The Picture of Dorian Gray, done in Monaco.  

Lowell Liebermann

Nelly Sachs’ poetry in these songs is World War II-era themes of yearning, grief and the Holocaust, and I think it would be right up Leon’s alley. It’s from a period that’s frequently a focus of his programs; it has a niche. Like the Schmitt, the Liebermann songs are heavily textured, beautifully orchestrated — and quite difficult.   

I sent the music to Leon to see what he would think of doing those. So now he’s aware of the score, and if it fits into one of his future thematic programs, hopefully he’ll consider presenting it.

PLN: Are there other pieces of French music besides Schmitt’s Psalm that you keep in your repertoire?

Pauline Viardot-Garcia, French vocalist and composer (1821-1910).

KU: I sing a good deal French repertoire, and I try to include some French music in every program I present.  I sing Ravel and Poulenc a lot, but I also like to explore lesser-known repertoire.  For instance, right now I’ve been focusing on the composer Pauline Viardot-Garcia. 

More broadly, when it comes to female composers I’ve been exploring Johanna Kinkel as well as presenting the works of other women composers who aren’t well-known at all.

PLN: Tell us a little about your current music activities, and future projects on the horizon.

KU: On the women composers theme, I’ve been focusing on this music with the soprano Tammy Hensrud.  Together we’ve presented works by composers like Cécile Chaminade and Juliana Hall in addition to the other ones I just mentioned.  My collaboration with Tammy is unique because as an ensemble, which is named Feminine Musique, we’re concentrating on “soprano duo” repertoire, including exploration of women composers as well as new commissions.  It’s a broad scope of repertoire which practically no one else is doing to such an extent.   

It turns out that there’s a lot more music than just the famous duet from Lakmé. I wonder if Schmitt wrote any music for soprano duo — because if so, we’d certainly be interested in exploring it. 

Feminine Musique sopranos Korliss Uecker and Tammy Hensrud, singing a Rossini duet at a recital in Bad Ems, Germany (May 2018).

Just last month we presented several concerts in Germany, and the reviews were very positive. What I find is that in Germany the audiences are looking for something different — but at the same time they hold singers to a very high standard.  So the reception we received was particularly gratifying.  Those concerts also included works by more familiar composers like Rossini, Offenbach and Humperdinck. 

My European activities have been particularly interesting and rewarding, such as a recital Tammy and I did last year at the estate of George Sand in France. The property is in a remote location, but the event was well-attended because the George Sand Association is a particularly active society.  

George Sand Estate (Nohant, France)

The event was highly historical in that the concert focused on the musicians and artists George Sand interacted with during her life.  The repertoire we presented was fascinating — just as fascinating as our pianist and the audience members turned out to be, I might add. 

I’m also involved in working with young composers in commissioning new works. As for more established contemporary composers, I have never performed any of Ken Fuchs’ scores, but I’m in touch with him and I really need to perform some of his music.  

I’m looking forward to some exciting upcoming projects as well, including several new premieres and concerts with old and new colleagues.  I’m hopeful that one of them will be with mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe.  Feminine Musique will also be returning to Germany next spring for an operatic concert in Bad Ems.

Michael Ching

Another upcoming performance is an event with the Fargo Moorhead Opera in October.  As a native North Dakotan, it has been a special opera company to me throughout my career, and I’m particularly excited to be joining them to celebrate the company’s 50th anniversary in a special concert conducted by Michael Ching.

Of particular interest to your readers is a concert of all-French music I’m preparing for February that will feature songs by Florent Schmitt and Ravel as well as ones by Pauline Viardot, Lili Boulanger, Augusta Holmès and Mel Bonis.  Right now I’m working through the repertoire, looking for particularly interesting material that may not be familiar to most music-lovers, and that’s a very interesting process.

Of course, it’s always particularly enjoyable when I have the opportunity to join my husband Jerry in performance.  In late July, we will be presenting the Massenet Elegy and several other works with cello and piano in two Kniesel Hall Chamber Music Festival concerts in Maine.  And in 2020, he and I will be presenting an entire recital of music together — details to come!

The Collaborative Piano Institute program here at Shattuck is quite unique in the field. Now in its second year, its mission is to teach pianists how to work in collaboration with singers.  The pianists I’ve spoken with say that they don’t know of any other program of this kind. 

We have experts like Martin Katz and Howard Watkins here, and my role in the program is coaching the young pianists as they hone their skills in working with vocalists.

Soprano Korliss Uecker and pianist Howard Watkins perform at the Collaborative Piano Institute (June 2018). (Photo: Barry Lau)

PLN: Are there any additional observations you would like to make about Psaume XLVII and the opportunity you were given to perform it?

KU: Just that it was the chance of a lifetime to sing a rare and wonderful piece of music — a presentation that was so special, I wore a Dior gown for the performance.  It seemed the right thing to do for such a significant occasion!

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We share Miss Uecker’s opinion that Schmitt’s Psaume XLVII is indeed something very special, and we hope that another opportunity to sing the glorious soprano solo part in this piece will come her way in the future.

Cello scores by Florent Schmitt, found in a Paris music store in June 2018. Schmitt composed three cello concertante works during his early, middle and later creative periods: Chant élégiaque (1899-1903), Final (1926); Introït, récit et conge (1948). (Photo: Aaron Merritt)

Over a composing career of seven decades, Florent Schmitt would pen music featuring nearly every instrument of the symphony orchestra in a solo capacity. The cello was no exception.

In fact, Schmitt composed three concertante pieces featuring the cello — one each during his early, middle and late period of creativity.  The earliest of the three is Schmitt’s Chant élégiaque, Opus 24, which dates from 1899-1903, roughly overlapping the composer’s Prix de Rome stay at the Villa Medici in Italy.

Florent Schmitt’s stay at the Villa Medici in Rome (1900-04) was notable for the amount of time he wasn’t there — instead traveling extensively on three continents.

[Actually, the word “stay” isn’t quite accurate, as Schmitt spent the lion’s share of his Prix de Rome period traveling throughout Europe, across the Mediterranean and in the Near East.]

The Chant élégiaque is an achingly gorgeous piece of music that, to my ears, seems clearly influenced by Schmitt’s teacher and mentor, Gabriel Fauré, who had composed his own Élégie for Cello in the 1880s.  In addition to sharing a similar title, the two works are similar in length.

Yet despite these similarities, Schmitt’s piece has its own distinct character and is every bit as much of a gem as Fauré’s essay.

Jean Bedetti (1883-1973)

As was customary for many of his compositions, Schmitt scored Chant élégiaque in two versions — the first one featuring cello with piano and a later arrangement for cello with orchestra.  The first performance of the orchestral version happened in 1912 at the Concerts Colonne, featuring cellist Jean Bedetti with the orchestral forces conducted by Gabriel Pierné.

A 1923 announcement promoting cellist Jean Bedetti’s U.S. performances. The French-born artist served as principal cellist at the Paris Opéra-Comique and the Colonne Concerts Orchestra before becoming principal cellist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1919 — a post he would hold for nearly three decades. Bedetti presented the first public performance of Florent Schmitt’s Chant élégiaque (orchestral version) in 1912, joined by the Colonne Orchestra under the direction of Gabriel Pierné.

More than a century later, it’s hard to fathom how a creation as richly beautiful as the Chant élégiaque has remained virtually unknown.  And yet, such is the case.

It is very rarely performed, and to my knowledge, the piece has been commercially recorded just one time — on the Eurodisc label in 1980 by cellist David Geringas with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Lawrence Foster.

The original Eurodisc LP release (1980).

Considering the rarity of the Schmitt work, the Eurodisc issue (two separate LPs) carried a rather puzzling title: Berühmte Celloromanzen (Famous Cello Romances).  In fairness, a number of the other pieces recorded by Geringas for the collection — selections by Bruch, Dvořák, Glazunov, Saint-Saëns and others — do certainly qualify as “famous” cello pieces.

I have loved the Geringas recording of Chant élégiaque ever since first hearing it in the early 1980s, but no other recording has came along since then.  Even more curiously, according to my research there has never been a commercial recording released of the piece in its cello/piano incarnation.

Over the years I’ve tried to interest numerous cellists in this score. It hasn’t been an easy undertaking, as the short-lived Eurodisc LP release did not appear again until well into the CD era.  Even now, the recording is difficult to obtain outside of Europe, and so most cellists had no easy way to hear the music’s charms — at least not until very recently when the Geringas recording was uploaded to SoundCloud.

Elisa Kohanski

Then in 2016 I was introduced to the American cellist Elisa Kohanski, who would take a keen interest in Schmitt’s piece. A native Rhode Islander who has made her professional career based in Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania), Kohanski keeps up a busy schedule as soloist, chamber music player and member of several ensembles including the PittsburghOpera and Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre orchestras.

The two of us met following a concert by the Wheeling (West Virginia) Symphony Orchestra, for which Kohanski serves as the cello section principal. On the Wheeling program was the suite from Fauré’s Pelléas et Mélisande.  I was particularly taken with Kohanski’s solo cello passages in the first movement of the suite, which were conveyed with a rare poignancy.

Becoming acquainted with Elisa Kohanski at a reception following a May 2016 Wheeling Symphony Orchestra concert — and talking about Gabriel Fauré and Florent Schmitt.

At a post-concert reception, the two of us had an opportunity to converse about our mutual love for Fauré’s music, during which time I spoke with her about Fauré’s pupil Florent Schmitt, and how Schmitt had also composed an elegiac cello piece in a similar vein to Fauré’s masterpiece.

Thus began an exploration of the composer and his music by Kohanski, culminating in presenting Florent Schmitt’s Chant élegiaque in public earlier this year — a performance that she paired with Fauré’s Élégie.

Recently I had the opportunity to visit again with Elisa Kohanski, asking her to share her “voyage of discovery” regarding the Chant élégiaque — along with soliciting her perspectives on the stylistic connections between the Fauré and Schmitt scores.  Highlights of our discussion are presented below. 

PLN: Before being introduced to Florent Schmitt’s Chant élégiaque, were you familiar with this composer or his music?

ECK: I must admit that I had never heard of Florent Schmitt or his music before you introduced me to several of his compositions in 2016.  Since then, I have thoroughly enjoyed my exploration of this composer and his music, along with the informative articles that I’ve read on the Florent Schmitt Website. 

When I began to research Schmitt’s scores on IMSLP, I was pleasantly surprised to see the large body of works listed, and I’m equally surprised by how relatively unknown he remains.  I know that you and others are trying to change that; I have to think that in time, more people will experience the joy of discovering Schmitt’s music.

PLN: What were your initial impressions of Chant élégiaque when you heard it for the first time?

ECK: I was quite surprised at the beauty of the music in my first hearing which was about two years ago.  It is a dramatic and lush piece!   

The Eurodisc Geringas reissue: two volumes consolidated onto one CD.

I loved the textures and the colors in the David Geringas recording with orchestra. The cello-and-piano version, which I think is the one that Schmitt composed first, is also rich in texture and full of rhythmic and dynamic variety.

I listened to the piece many times, and finally decided that I had to perform it. And so, earlier this year I paired it with Gabriel Fauré’s Élégie to present during a church service in Pittsburgh, PA — Shadyside Presbyterian Church — on Valentine’s Day.  Jack Kurutz, one of my regular piano collaborators in Pittsburgh, joined me in the performance. 

The pairing of the Schmitt and Fauré pieces worked very well, and the feedback I received from the members of the congregation was extremely positive. No one had heard of Florent Schmitt, but they all expressed how much they loved the piece. I encouraged them to visit the Florent Schmitt Website to explore more about the composer and his music. 

PLN: Florent Schmitt was a student of Gabriel Fauré, and Fauré composed his famous Élégie for Cello approximately 20 years before Schmitt wrote the Chant élégiaque.   Do you see similarities in the two scores — or any sort of stylistic debt that Schmitt may owe to Fauré in this piece?

Three photo-portraits of Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) in early, middle and later life. Fauré was Florent Schmitt’s teacher and mentor at the Paris Conservatoire.

ECK: I was very excited to learn about the connection between Florent Schmitt and Gabriel Fauré as student and teacher, as I absolutely love Fauré’s music. My first experience with the Élégie was in high school when I performed it in a competition for a memorial scholarship in my first teacher’s name, Ruth Trexler.  

That first performance was a powerfully emotional experience and I wound up winning the scholarship. The piece became something I’ve treasured ever since for its beautiful and moving melodies — not to mention its significance as music that is inextricably linked to my development as an artist. 

The Chant élégiaque definitely has elements and aspects which seem to come from Fauré’s influence.  Beyond the obvious fact that both pieces are elegiac in their mood, in both compositions the beginning cello melody has a repeated rhythmic figure in the accompaniment.  

There are also sections in both pieces in which three components are present — repeated rhythmic accompaniment in one piano line with a melody in the other, along with a second melodic line in the cello part.  

PLN:  What about differences between the two pieces?

ECK:  Yes, there are differences; Fauré’s Élégie has more static, slow-changing harmonies while Schmitt’s music has a greater rate of harmonic change. Both compositions contain sustained chordal harmonies, but the Fauré utilizes steady eighth notes whereas Schmitt incorporates syncopation. Both pieces also feature a strong rhythmic drive leading up to a climax.  

As for some other differences, Fauré uses chromaticism primarily to transition from one section to another while Schmitt incorporates chromaticism as a core element of his thematic material. Perhaps this is due to the later date of Schmitt’s composition; during that era in classical music development, a difference of just 20 years is a pretty significant period of time.

Fauré’s repeated slow rhythms create a bit of a calming effect, whereas in the Schmitt the varied and syncopated rhythmic patterns add tension. Fauré often takes turns with the melody, alternating between cello and piano, whereas Schmitt juxtaposes the melodic lines in the cello and accompaniment simultaneously.   

I appreciate both the similarities and the differences, and when all is said and done, I think that both pieces are magnificent cello works.

PLN: Looking at the score to Chant élégiaque, is the writing for cello idiomatic and natural, or are there aspects that seem to be unusual or awkward?

ECK: Delightful as it is to say, the piece is idiomatic for the cello and it feels very natural to play. There is a lot of chromaticism which one would expect during this time period, but the only somewhat dicey moment is a huge leap up to high G#.    

Jack Kurutz

For the pianist, the music does present challenges in its sweeping lines and large leaps with dense chords, along with brief dramatic outbursts covering large swaths of the keyboard. I’ve read that Schmitt was quite a good pianist — and you can certainly tell that in the way he constructed the piano part for this piece.

One of the primary gauges for me with music is considering if the technical difficulty is worth the commitment to learn it.  Is there a great musical payoff?  In this case, I would say, “Absolutely!”

PLN: Please tell us more about bringing Chant élégiaque into your repertoire.  

ECK: I’m extremely excited to add this beautiful piece to my repertoire. It’s well-suited for any performance venue and I have requested to play it in several programs. I’m in the process of scheduling the upcoming season along with my repertoire for the concerts, and I hope to include it in at least a few of them. 

PLN: Does becoming acquainted with the Chant élégiaque make you interested in getting to know some of Schmitt’s other compositions — instrumental, chamber and even orchestral works?

ECK: It surely does! It’s very exciting to be able to find music that one wouldn’t normally be exposed to in the more commonly performed repertoire.  

Of course, we all want to learn the standard repertoire; it’s standard for a reason. However, there is so much incredible music out there that has been largely overlooked. I’m in the process of listening to Schmitt’s other compositions and, of course, I read about them and listen to them when you post new articles on the Florent Schmitt Blog.  

I only wish he had written music for multiple cellos! 

PLN: You keep up a very busy schedule of concertizing and performing, in addition to teaching. What are some of your current activities?

Trebinje, Bosnia-Herzegovina

ECK: In addition to my work with the PittsburghOpera, the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre and the Wheeling Symphony Orchestra, I present solo and chamber music programs in the United States and also overseas. In the first two weeks of August I’ll be at the Music & More SummerFest in Trebinje, Bosnia as a faculty-artist participant — the inaugural year for this program.

Cellist Elisa Kohanski on Antarctica (2016).

I consider myself fortunate to have had the opportunity to perform on all seven continents.  Even further afield, I can claim the distinction of having performed the cello on Antarctica — to an audience of penguins (!) — and this past summer I also played on an iceberg in the Arctic Circle. I like to joke that I could be classified as a “bipolar” musician!

I’ll be sure to inform you about the next time I will be performing the Chant élégiaque, so that Florent Schmitt aficionados can make plans to come hear it in concert should they wish to do so.

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For lovers of Florent Schmitt’s music — and cello music in general — the prospects of being able to experience the Chant éléqiaque live is a tantalizing prospect, indeed!  Grateful thanks to Elisa Kohanski for becoming a modern-day champion of this repertoire — music that’s “rare and well-done.”

[Incidentally, a live performance by Kohanski and Kurutz has been uploaded to SoundCloud and can be accessed via this link.]

Florent Schmitt, photographed at about the time Feuillets de voyage was published by Durand et Cie. (1913).

Often, composers “favor” instruments that they themselves know how to play.  Florent Schmitt’s own instruments were the piano, organ and flute, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that a significant number of this composer’s creations would feature these instruments.

In particular, Schmitt was a highly proficient pianist, which helps explain the expressiveness and effectiveness of his piano compositions – not forgetting their technical challenges as well.

Florent Schmitt’s complete works for duo-pianists — a 4-CD set recorded by the Invencia Piano Duo in 2011-13.

While Schmitt composed piano works throughout his long creative career (70+ years), early on we encounter a goodly number of pieces he wrote for two pianists. Indeed, those compositions are enough to fill out a 4-CD set – which is precisely what the Invencia Piano Duo did in 2011-2013, with four volumes of material released on NAXOS’ Grand Piano imprint — a number of the pieces recording premieres.

One of the most delightful of these works is Feuillets de voyage, Opus 26.  This “travel diary” is a set of ten pieces for piano duet that was published in 1905 by Berlin-based Schlesingerische Buch- und Musikhandlung – two livres of five numbers each.

The LeRoi-Nickel Piano Duo recording on the Arsis label (2008).

The composition was begun in 1903 when Schmitt was rounding out his four-year Prix de Rome tenure.

Considering that the score was completed and published within two years of its inception, why it took nearly a decade longer (1913) for the music to be brought out by Durand, Schmitt’s regular publisher in Paris, is anyone’s guess.

A vintage copy of the score to Florent Schmitt’s Feuillets de voyage (1903-5), one of several sets of piano pieces he composed for piano duet. This transcription for solo piano was prepared by the composer in 1926.

How best to describe these ten pieces? To begin with, they’re utterly charming numbers – miniatures that typically last only a few minutes each (just two of the ten numbers clock in at longer than four minutes).  One can definitely discern the spirit of Robert Schumann — but also of Chabrier — in these pieces which are by turns whimsical, lyrical, and robustly dynamic.

The Ivaldi-Pennetier recording on the Timpani label (2008).

The entire set is meaty musical material – far more than salon pieces, even if they are reminiscent of “salon style” in some respects.

Unlike Reflets d’Allemagne, another piano duet set of pieces that Schmitt composed at roughly the same time and where each movement was named after a city in the Germanic world, for the most part the individual movements that make up Feuillets de voyage aren’t descriptive of any particular place.  Instead, the descriptive titles the composer gave to the numbers are as follows:

Book 1

• Sérénade
• Visite
• Compliments
• Douceur du soir (Twilight)
• Danse britannique (Dance of Brittany)

Book 2

• Berceuse
• Mazurka
• Marche burlesque
• Retour à l’endroit familier (Return to Familiar Surroundings)
• Valse

Book 1 begins with an elegant serenade in three-quarter time. There follow three movements that are introspective in mood, and the set concludes with an energetic Dance of Brittany.

First recording: Isabel Beyer and Harvey Dagul on the Four Hands Music label (1998/2000).

Book 2 starts quietly with a lilting lullaby that is followed by a stately mazurka and then a biting, sarcastic march-burlesque. A delicate and whimsical flavor informs the Returning Home movement, but that doesn’t end Schmitt’s travel diary.  Instead, the composer finishes up with a rumbustious waltz — a highly infectious number that gathers up the listener in its swirl of excitement.

During his career, Schmitt was known for penning some highly effective compositions in waltz-time … and this one from Feuillets de voyage is one of the very best examples.

Isabel Beyer and Harvey Dagul

Considering the wit and charm of these pieces, it’s a wonder that they aren’t well-known and that more pianists don’t perform them — but arguably Feuillets de voyage is even more obscure than Reflets d’Allemagne.

Even so, we are fortunate that four commercial recordings have been made of this music – although the first one didn’t appear until the late 1990s — nearly a century following the music’s composition:

• Isabel Beyer & Harvey Dagul (Four Hands Music, 1998/Book 1 and 2000/Book 2)
• Timothy Nickel & Nancy LeRoi (Arsis, 2008)
• Christian Ivaldi & Jean-Claude Pennetier (Timpani, 2008)
• Invencia Piano Duo (Andrey Kasparov & Oksana Lutsyshyn) (NAXOS Grand Piano, 2011)

Jean-Claude Pennetier and Christian Ivaldi

All four of these interpretations have their own special qualities, and each of them is well-worth getting to know. Certainly, there are some contrasts in the approach each of the duo-pianist teams take with the music — with several of the interpretations emphasizing lyricism while others being more rhythmically incisive — but to my ears each of them is thoroughly valid.

LeRoi-Nickel Piano Duo

The release dates of the commercial recordings suggest that Feuillets de voyage has been growing in visibility only in the past decade or so.

At the time that the Beyer/Dagul premiere recordings appeared on the Four Hands Music label, the CD liner notes reported that the pieces “seem to be totally neglected at the present time.”  Happily, those circumstances have since changed; beginning in 2008 there were three additional commercial recordings released in quick succession.

Invencia Piano Duo

Heightened interest in Schmitt’s score is also borne out by several live performances of this music that have been uploaded to YouTube and SoundCloud in recent years. You can view one such example here.

In a sense, we shouldn’t be surprised at the emergence of this music — even if it’s late in the game. Not only are they thoroughly enchanting pieces guaranteed to please an audience, the fact that they were created for performance on a single piano makes the “logistics” of presenting them in recital easier as compared to a work like Schmitt’s Trois rhapsodies (1903-4) which requires two instruments.

In another parallel to Reflets d’Allemagne, Schmitt orchestrated seven of the ten numbers that make up Feuillets de voyage (all except for Visite and Douceur du soir from Book 1 and the Mazurka from Book 2).  This practice wasn’t unusual for Schmitt, who orchestrated many of his creations for piano and also for voice.  (It’s a double treat for us, too, considering Schmitt’s dazzling orchestration abilities in the grandest post-Rimsky tradition.)

A view of the Théâtre Fémina from about the time of the premiere performance of Florent Schmitt’s orchestral version of Feuillets de voyage (1913). The theatre was located on the Boulevard des Champs-Élysées in the 8th arrondissement of Paris.

The orchestral version of Feuillets de voyage was premiered in 1913 at the Théâtre Fémina in Paris conducted by Joseph-Eugène Szyfer (1887-1947).  (It is conceivable that the occasion of this orchestral premiere might have prompted Durand’s publication of the piano score in the same year.)

Interestingly, whereas Schmitt’s biographer Yves Hucher lists seven of the ten original numbers as being orchestrated by the composer, the published orchestral score by Durand includes just five, presented in the following sequence:

• Sérénade – from Book 1
• Retour à l’endient familier – from Book 2
• Danse britannique – from Book 1
• Berceuse – from Book 2
• Marche burlesque – from Book 2

If the remaining two orchestrated numbers – Compliments from Book 1 and particularly the terrific Valse from Book 2 – are now lost, that would indeed be a shame.

Jacques Houtmann

Unfortunately, no commercial recording of the orchestral version of Feuillets has ever been made, nor do we have audio documentation of any live orchestral performance available to hear.  Indeed, I have been able to find just one instance of this music being performed by any orchestra in the postwar period – in 2002 by the Orchestre National de Lorraine conducted by Jacques Houtmann.

… Which is a situation that should definitely be redressed.  Here’s hoping that more conductors will investigate this music and bring it to today’s audiences.

Even better, how about giving us a first-ever recording?  Alain Altinoglu, Lionel Bringuier, Stéphane Denève, JoAnn Falletta, Fabien Gabel, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Yan-Pascal Tortelier … who’s game?

Within the extensive catalogue of compositions by Florent Schmitt are a large number of choral works, great and small. Of these, music-lovers are likely to be most familiar with Schmitt’s grandiose setting of Psalm 47, which he composed in 1904 during his Prix de Rome period.

But most of Schmitt’s other choral works are vastly different from the Psalm. Of particular interest are five sets of pieces that he composed for female voices — all but one of which appeared comparatively late in the composer’s career:

• Six choeurs, Op. 81  (1931)
• En bonnes voix, Op. 91  (1938)
• Trois trios, Op. 99  (1940)
• De vive voix, Op. 131  (1955)
• Cinq refrains, Op. 132  (1955)

The shortest of these — yet one of the most musically satisfying — is Trois trios, Opus 91 from 1940.  Fittingly, Schmitt turned to a “trio” of contemporary writers for inspiration in composing this set of pieces, inspired by three poems published all in the same year (1936):

I.   Les Tambours qui parlant (The Talking Drums) — Jean Cocteau

II.  L’étang (The Pond) — René Chalupt

III. D’un mille-pattes amoureux (From an Enamored Millipede) — Tristan Derème

The February 1936 issue of La Nouvelle revue francaise brought out two of the three poems that Florent Schmitt set to music in his 1941 Trois trios — the ones by Jean Cocteau and Tristan Derème.

Tristan Derème was the nom de plume for Philippe Huc (1889-1941).

Indeed, as all three writers were particular favorites of the composer, Schmitt would turn to them for literary inspiration on several different occasions. In the case of Trois trios, the poetry gave the composer the opportunity to indulge in his penchant for “irony, fantasy and mischievousness,” as Canadian arts administrator Laurent Patenaude states it.

One of the characteristics of Trois trios that makes it such an appealing composition is the inventive chromaticism of the writing.  Combined with the infectiously attractive blending of the female voices, it makes for a rich and robust sonic brew for sure.

Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau (1889-1963)

Schmitt scored the music so that it could be sung by a women’s chorus, or alternatively by three solo voices (a soprano, mezzo and contralto). But as was the case with many of his creations, the composer also prepared a version of Trois trios for voices and orchestra in addition to the one with piano.

As it so happened, it was in that form that the first public performance of the music occurred in April 1942, featuring three soloists (Mmes. Blanc-Andrea, Myrtal and Fleuret) rather than a full chorus, along with the Pasdeloup Orchestra.

Writing about that premiere performance in the pages of Les Nouveaux temps, the French arts journalist Robert Bernard noted:

René Chalupt (1885-1957), a poet whose writings were set to music by numerous composers — Louis Aubert, Georges Auric, Darius Milhaud, Carlos Pedress, Jean Rivier, Albert Roussel, Erik Satie, etc. — in addition to Florent Schmitt.

“No musician is less bound than Florent Schmitt by a formula’s constraints, and a whole part of his creative output — a substantial and significant part, actually — is steeped in the most playful liveliness and an ironic verve that stretches ultimately to an utterly paradoxical and truculent fantasy. These pieces … fall into this category.”

Indeed, the three pieces that make up Trois trios couldn’t be more different — a military song followed by a nocturne and then a really bizarre nursery rhyme (trust me on this).

Trois trios was published by Durand et Cie. in 1947, five years after the premiere performance.

Original Calliope release (2001).

I first came to know Trois trios on a commercial recording of Florent Schmitt’s complete works for female chorus, recorded in 2001 by the Choeur des femmes calliope directed by Régine Théodoresco.

Initially released on the Calliope label, in recent years the recording has been reissued by Timpani, a label which has been particularly attentive to presenting Schmitt’s music to the public.

The 2000 release on the ATMA label.

Later on, I discovered that another commercial recording of Trois trios predated the Calliope release by one year — a recording on the ATMA label that features the female voices of Le Jeune Opéra du Québec, directed by Gilbert Patenaude.

Both of these performances are fine interpretations, with the vocalists and pianists navigating Schmitt’s sometimes complex rhythms and harmonies with real aplomb.

An example of the many René Chalupt literary creations set to music. The 1934 composition pictured here is by Albert Roussel, with the score inscribed by the composer.

More recently, a public performance of Trois trios has came to light — one that emanates from Tokyo, Japan. Presented in 2008, it features the Mimosa Chorus directed by Hiroshi Goto along with pianist Rieko Kanehara.  I am equally impressed with the effectiveness of this performance … and you can judge for yourself as well, courtesy of YouTube:

I.   Les Tambours qui parlant

II.  L’étang

III. D’un mille-pattes amoureux

Unfortunately, what none of these performances gives us is Schmitt’s version for chorus with orchestra; we can only imagine how effective that would be — master orchestrator that Schmitt was.

As with the composer’s elusive orchestral version of the 1931 Six choeurs, here’s hoping that an enterprising conductor will be inspired to bring these orchestral arrangements to us in the near future.

Camouflage, a view of Florent Schmitt’s longtime home, painted by French artist Mathieu Cherkit (2017).

Mathieu Cherkit

Not long ago, a document surfaced on the Internet that dates from the time of the Paris Exposition of 1937. As Europe’s last great transnational gathering before World War II swept the continent, countries great and small exhibited their art and culture at the International Exposition of Art and Technology in Modern Life (as it was officially named) — along with a proffering a heavy dose of militarism and political ideology in some cases — on the banks of the Seine River.

Fêtes de la lumière at the Paris Exposition, 1937.

Among the most memorable events held during the Paris Exposition were the Fêtes de la lumières — symphonies of sound, lights and water for which 18 Parisian composers had been commissioned to create original works of music.  These were broadcast along with accompanying choreographic displays of water and lights in truly memorable spectacles designed to touch all the senses.

The historical document in question is a typewritten page that lists the 18 composers and the their creations, referenced below in order of their debuts at the Paris Exposition along with the total number performances each piece received:

• Florent Schmitt: Fête de la lumière  (8 performances)
• Jean Rivier: Fête de rêve  (3)
• Jacques Ibert: Fête nationale  (1)
• Elsa Barraine: Fête des colonies  (1)
• Darius Milhaud: Fête de la musique  (4)
• Raymond Loucheur: Fête de la Seine  (6)
• Manuel Rosenthal: Fête du vin  (2)
• Marcel Delannoy: Fête de la danse  (3)
• Claude Delvincourt: Fête de l’automne  (3)
• Louis Aubert: Fête de l’éte  (2)
• Paul Le Flem: Fête du printemps  (1)
• Arthur Honegger: Mille et un nuits  (6)
• Désiré-Emile Inghelbrecht: Fête enfantine  (1)
• Henry Barraud: Fête du feu  (4)
• Pierre Vellones: Fête fantastique  (5)
• Maurice Yvain: Fête du chanson  (2)
• Olivier Messiaen: Fête des belles eaux  (6)
• Charles Koechlin: Fête des eaux vives  (3)

The most interesting aspect of the document is that the home addresses of all 18 composers are listed. All but two of the composers — Florent Schmitt and Marcel Delannoy — were residents of Paris at the time, and thanks to Google Maps it is possible to see those addresses today via Google’s “street view” mode.

Not surprising to anyone who has visited the City of Lights, what we find is that the composers resided in apartments scattered among nine of the twenty arrondissements in the city of Paris.  Even today, all of the domiciles appear to be situated in decent or prosperous neighborhoods.

Gilles Poilvet

A French friend of mine, business finance expert and lifetime avocational pianist Gilles Poilvet, has commented to me that the domiciles of these composers are well in keeping with what Paris was then, and remains today:

“Since the 19th century, in-town residential Paris is made up of 99% apartments due to a transformation of the city as ordered by Emperor Napoleon III during the 1860s, when half of the city was totally rebuilt with large avenues and large buildings. I lived in Paris from 1990 to 1997 but left when I got married, because living in Paris with young children is a quite a nightmare!

Where we live now, in Le Havre, is just a two-hour drive from Paris. It isn’t difficult for us to spend time in Paris with my family — visiting the city as ‘tourists’ which is the most enjoyable way to experience Paris.”

Whereas all of the composers’ addresses in Paris are apartment buildings, Florent Schmitt’s situation was different. Rather than residing in the city, from 1910 onward Schmitt made his home in Saint-Cloud, a close-in suburb across the Seine River and situated fewer than a dozen miles from downtown Paris.

Florent Schmitt standing on the front steps of his St-Cloud home in 1937, the year of the Paris Exposition. (Photo: Boris Lipnitzki/Roger-Viollet)

Perhaps the reason Schmitt chose to live in St-Cloud was because neither he nor his wife originated as “city folk”:  He was born in the small town of Blâmont in Lorraine; she was a Pyrénéenne from the extreme south of the country.

The Schmitt family lived in two places in St-Cloud during the ‘teens before ultimately settling at a large estate on the Rue du Calvaire in 1920, where Schmitt would live for the next 35 years until nearly the end of his long life (1958).

Double humide 4, painted by Mathieu Cherket in 2016. Notice the urns — the same ones from nearly 80 years ago.

On Google Maps’ street view, the differences between Schmitt and the other composers appear striking; whereas all of the other domiciles are shown as attractive 4- and 5-story walkup flats, Schmitt’s address comes up as a stone wall.

At first I was a little mystified, wondering what might have become of the Schmitt residence. Gilles Poilvet’s description of St-Cloud today wasn’t particularly encouraging, either:

“Saint-Cloud has changed a lot since 1937, and it’s very likely that most of the big houses of that time have been replaced by apartments and other large buildings. Schmitt would be surprised (and disappointed) by the incredible amount of traffic there.  The changes in the town are explained by the upward pressure on residential prices in Paris and its suburbs.  But there are still some large homes in St-Cloud owned by rich families.”

A study for Balcon pointu, Mathieu Cherkit’s painting of the second floor balcony of Maison Schmitt/Cherkit (2016).

Further intrigued, I switched to Google Maps’ satellite view, which revealed that while there are indeed several large apartment buildings across the road and down the street from the Rue du Calvaire address, the side of the road where Schmitt lived still shows what appear to be older residential structures.

Perhaps the existence of railroad tracks immediately behind these properties — likely predating the development of the suburb — has made this particular narrow strip of land inhospitable to the construction of large, multi-story apartment complexes like the ones that are found nearby.

Even more curiously, the spot denoting Schmitt’s address is completely obstructed by a forest of trees; as far as Google Maps’ satellite view is concerned, it’s as if there is no house there at all.

Entre deux, Mathieu Cherkit’s paintings of one of the entrances to Maison Schmitt/Cherkit in St-Cloud (2013).

But as it turns out, Florent Schmitt’s home still stands. Not only that, it remains in the hands of the very same family that took possession of the property following Schmitt’s departure in the mid-1950s.

Indeed, since that time, four generations of the same family have resided at this property. Today’s current resident of Schmitt’s home is a fellow-artist — but one of a different kind.  He is the young French painter Mathieu Cherkit.

Mathieu Cherkit’s painting of the staircase at Maison Schmitt/Cherkit.

In fact, Cherkit has lived at the property on Rue du Calvaire nearly his entire life.  Born in 1982, Cherkit spent his childhood in the home of his grandparents and continues to live there today with his own family, prolonging the duration of just two families owning this property to a full 100 years.

Not only that, it turns out that the house has become the inspiration for many of Mathieu Cherkit’s artistic creations.  The artist informs me that he has created no fewer than 180 paintings that revolve around the house and its surrounding grounds.  In a sense, the home and its “personality” acts as a kind of muse to the artist.

La chute, another staircase view (upper floors) painted by Mathieu Cherkit (2016).

Educated as a painter in Paris, Nantes and Leipzig, Cherkit’s artistry started becoming noticed in the art world beginning around 2010.  Since that time his work has been exhibited in Paris and other French cities as well as outside the country.

In addition to being included in the collections of the National Fund of Contemporary Art, Cherkit’s artistic creations are carried by numerous galleries such as Tajan Art Studio (Paris), Jean Brolly (Paris), Henri Chartier (Lyon), Albada Jelgersma (Amsterdam) and the Lacoux Contemporary Art Centre.

La Porte rouge, Mathieu Cherkit’s portrayal of a side doorway entrance to Maison Schmitt/Cherkit (2017).

Cherkit’s paintings are typically created as oils on canvass. They have been described as multilayered paintings that encompass bold pastels.  Emmanuelle Le Bail, director of the Musée des Avelines, characterizes Cherkit’s artistry as follows:

“Mathieu’s paintings explode, saturate our eyes, challenge us — disturb us perhaps — and surely question us about what it is to be a painter today. They succeed as tours de force of figurative painting.”

Florent Schmitt, photographed at home in 1953 seated at the side doorway entrance leading to his study. (Photo: Boris Lipnitzki/Roger Viollet)

As for the role Maison Schmitt/Cherkit plays in all of this, it has become the primary focus of Cherkit’s more recent creations:  an intimate look at his environment, translating his everyday life onto the canvas.

Nearly every nook and cranny of the house and grounds have become the subjects of the artist’s paintings — now numbering some 180 creations.

Mathieu Cherkit paintings on display at the Musée des Avelines

As French fellow artist Marc Desgrandschamps remarked upon the opening of an exhibition of Mathieu Cherkit’s paintings at the Tajan gallery in Paris in 2017:

Marc Desgrandchamps

“[In this exhibition] the young artist reproduces the reality of his familiar places — his daily wonders.  It is a world of plenteousness — plenteous objects and vegetation in interiors and gardens where nothing happens … if attention to detail is the mark of precision, then it suffuses Mathieu Cherkit’s paintings in the abundance of details disseminated within his monumental compositions. 

These details are clues to a narrative that wants reconstructing — an investigation that wants conducting.  Around nothingness something eventually springs — the traces or beginnings of a story …”

“Around nothingness something eventually springs — the traces or beginnings of a story …” Dirty Banana, Mathieu Cherkit’s painting of the kitchen and passageway area of Maison Schmitt/Cherkit (2012).

Mathieu Cherkit (Photo: François Marielle, 2010)

A number of years ago, Mathieu Cherkit was filmed working in and around the residence and grounds, where the viewer can see glimpses of how the property inspires … challenges … and in a sense protects the artist and preserves his inheritance.

One clearly notices the heritage — down to the very same urns that adorn the front steps of the home that were there back in Florent Schmitt’s own day. The home itself seems untouched by time — the exterior, the architectural details, the parlors and kitchen/pantry spaces; some of the interior furnishings could well be holdovers from a century ago.

At the same time, this is very much the atelier of a contemporary artist in which the “tools of the trade” are clearly visible and in use in the several rooms that Cherkit uses as his studio spaces to create his paintings.

Mathieu Cherkit’s atelier on the top floor of Maison Schmitt/Cherkit.

Numerous everyday “found objects” find their way into Cherkit’s scenes, too, lending a sense of the ordinary to what is in many respects a very extraordinary place.

Open (2017). Mathieu Cherkit’s painting from the top floor of his home shows St-Cloud apartment buildings in the foreground. The Eiffel Tower is in the far distance, some 10 miles away.

In a way, the Cherkit property has become a vestige from an earlier age, as the march of time inexorably changes the character of the surrounding neighborhoods. St-Cloud today may be vastly different from before, but at Maison Schmitt/Cherkit the atmosphere is very much the same as it’s always been.

At its best, art is timeless. It speaks to viewers over the decades and has meaning to successive generations of people.  “Back in the day” Schmitt’s estate was a welcoming place for musicians, authors and artists who were treated to regular Sunday afternoon open house events hosted by the composer and his wife.

Botanica, painted by Mathieu Cherkit (2017).

At the same time, it was also a place of refuge where Schmitt could retreat to create more than 70 significant musical compositions from 1920 onwards.

Today, it is Mathieu Cherkit’s place of refuge, inspiring as well as enabling him to create consequential paintings that command the attention of the art world.

En plein air — the artist at work: Mathieu Cherkit at Maison Schmitt/Cherkit.

Indeed, this century-long spirit of artistry is imbued in the property, giving it a personality of its own. Long may it continue to inspire!

To view additional paintings by Mathieu Cherkit, you can explore the artist’s online gallery on Artnet.  There is also a brief radio interview from earlier this year that’s available on France-Culture in which the artist comes across as, in the words of author and musicologist Nicolas Southon, “a really cool, easy-going gentleman.”

Florent Schmitt’s late-career quartet Pour presque tous les temps (“Quartet for Almost All the Time”), performed at the Scarab Chamber Music Series in Detroit (Grosse Pointe), Michigan (October 2018).

On October 7, 2018, Detroit’s Scarab Club Chamber Music Series launched its 21st season with a performance of Florent Schmitt’s quartet Pour presque tous les temps, Op. 138 (“Quartet for Almost All the Time”), a late-career work for flute, violin, cello and piano created by Schmitt in 1956 when the composer was 86 years old.

Despite the advanced age of its creator, there’s nothing at all “old” about the piece. Instead, the four-movement work has a youthful vitality; it’s music that sounds fresh and full-bodied throughout.

All of these characteristics were brought to the fore in the Scarab Chamber Music performance, which featured four well-known Detroit-area classical musicians:

Dennis Carter (flute) — principal flautist at the Michigan Philharmonic and the Dearborn Symphony

Nadine Deleury (cello) — principal cellist at the Michigan Opera Theatre Orchestra

Velda Kelly (violin) — violinist at the Michigan Opera Theatre Orchestra and frequent guest musician at the Detroit Symphony Orchestra

John McLaughlin Williams (piano) — violinist, pianist and conductor (and a NAXOS recording artist)

The musicians who presented Florent Schmitt’s Pour presque tous les temps: (l. to r.) John McLaughlin Williams (piano); Velda Kelly (violin); Nadine Deleury (cello); Dennis Carter (flute).

As infectiously delightful as Pour presque tous les temps is, I find little evidence that the music has been performed in North America with any frequency.  Indeed, with the exception of a performance of just the slow movement presented by the CreArtBox Music Ensemble in New York City last year, I have found no record of the piece being programmed anywhere on the continent in the past 30+ years — all of which made the presentation by the Scarab Club Chamber Music Series that much more welcome.

Florent Schmitt’s composition was part of an adventuresome concert of music that also included works by Gabriel Fauré, Egon Kornauth and Michael Gandolfi. It’s the sort of programming that’s par for the course at the Scarab Club Chamber Music Series, which often showcases lesser known-yet-highly worthy repertoire.

The inventive October 7, 2018 Scarab Club Chamber Music Series concert program.

Underscoring this emphasis, future Scarab concerts this season will feature string trios by the Hungarian composer Léo Weiner and the Italian Marco Enrico Bossi, a string quartet by the Russo-Canadian Airat Ichimouratov, plus the Piano Quintet by Amy Marcy Cheney Beach, among other intriguing offerings.

Considering the kind of repertoire it presents, it isn’t surprising that the Scarab Club Chamber Music Series attracts an attentive audience that is curious and open to exploring the byways of classical music.

Knowing that I was planning to travel to Detroit to attend the October 7th concert, I was asked by the Scarab’s co-artistic directors Nadine Deleury and Velda Kelly to moderate a Q&A session with the musicians during the intermission immediately following the presentation of Schmitt’s Pour presque tous les temps.

Nearly the entire audience stayed to hear the lively 20-minute interview. Highlights from the discussion are presented below:

PLN: Prior to preparing and performing the quartet Pour presque tous les temps, were you familiar with Florent Schmitt and his music?

John McLaughlin Williams

John McLaughlin Williams: I’d known about Florent Schmitt for a long time — probably more than 25 years.  I’ve played the violin part in one of his big pieces — the Sonate libre.  I consider it to be one of Schmitt’s greatest works; it’s almost like a symphony for violin and piano.  One of my performances from the 1990s has been uploaded to SoundCloud.

Velda Kelly: I was familiar with the composer — particularly his Piano Quintet.  But I hadn’t played anything by him before this.

Nadine Deleury: As a French musician, I was familiar with him of course.  But I haven’t played any music by Florent Schmitt until now.

Dennis Carter: This was my first time discovering and playing Schmitt as well.

PLN: As a group, how did you come to choose this particular piece by Schmitt?

Nadine Deleury: Well, you had something to do with it, because as you’ll remember we corresponded about this composition for a number of years — how to obtain the score and a recording — before we decided to program it.

John McLaughlin Williams: This is a piece I had brought to the group as a possible repertoire item several times over the years.

Velda Kelly: As for why we decided to program it at the beginning of this season, it was because we would have extra time to rehearse over the summer rather than trying to fit it in between several concerts closer together.  We could start our preparations a little earlier because we knew it was a challenging piece of music.

PLN: What were your initial impressions when you looked at the score?

Dennis Carter

Dennis Carter: I was terrified, actually.  Just seeing the technical difficulties — the range for the flute, and the leaps and the octaves.  But thankfully, things settled in pretty quickly and now everything is cool.  I love the piece now.

Velda Kelly: I was charmed by what I saw when I looked at the score.  I could tell that the music was extremely witty — and something that our audience would really enjoy.

Even though the music looked quite challenging and difficult to put together, the end result was lively and uplifting.

John McLaughlin Williams: I find much of Florent Schmitt’s music very pointillistic; it’s similar to the pointillistic style of painting.  Like those paintings, when you’re standing far away everything has a very familiar shape, but when you’re up close, it’s a series of little dots or points of music which at first don’t seem to have a logical connection.

But in actuality, it’s extremely logical. Schmitt has things planned down to the very last 32nd rest.  It’s an amazing application of technique, and it’s an inspiration.

A vintage copy of the score to Florent Schmitt’s 1956 quartet Pour presque tous les temps, inscribed by musicians of the Scarab Club Chamber Music Series.

PLN: What was it like to prepare Pour presque tous les temps for performance, and how did you approach rehearsing the music?

Nadine Deleury: This is very unusual for us, but we decided to hold some of our rehearsals with two or three of the musicians instead of all four.  It’s actually quite rare for a small chamber group to split up like that for rehearsals, but in doing so we heard things in the music that we hadn’t discerned before.  It was quite helpful to our preparation.

Velda Kelly

Velda Kelly: I actually think our best rehearsals were when we split into smaller groups.  The sectional combinations we held were for the violin and cello; violin, cello and flute; and also violin, flute and piano.

Schmitt’s music has so much texture, it was difficult to process everything that was going on when all four of us were playing at once.  But after these sectionals, things came together very nicely.

John McLaughlin Williams: The piano part is very rich and robust even on its own.  Schmitt really knew how to compose for the keyboard.  He was a pianist himself, and there’s an amazing corpus of music he wrote for the keyboard.

Visiting with musicians of the Scarab Club’s Chamber Music Series post-concert along with Fr. Edouard Perrone, conductor of Paul Paray’s complete orchestral and choral recordings made for Grotto Productions including two symphonies, sacred works, and ballet music. In addition to being a composer, Paul Paray (1886-1979) was a world-renowned music director of the Detroit Symphony and other orchestras who led more premiere performances of Florent Schmitt’s orchestral works than any other conductor. (Photo: Jay Reid)

Nadine Deleury: John, you’re first and foremost a violinist.  I’ve been meaning to ask — how come you decided to play the piano part in this piece instead of the violin?

John McLaughlin Williams: That’s an easy question to answer:  You asked me!

PLN: What you’re saying about these rehearsals mirrors what I hear often about Florent Schmitt’s scores — that they’re challenging even for highly trained musicians.  Do you think Schmitt’s music is more complex than it needs to be?

John McLaughlin Williams: Absolutely not!  It is true that Schmitt had a penchant for complexity, but as he moved along in his career we actually find that he’s able to achieve the same effects with a simpler palette.

Schmitt was very specific in the effects he wanted to achieve in his music. When you study his scores, you find that every note and every notation has a specific purpose; nothing is extraneous.

Another interesting observation I have when I look at this particular score is this: It would be very easy to orchestrate it. Even though the piece is scored for just four instruments, the way it’s written it’s very clear how one could expand the instrumentation to encompass a full symphony orchestra.

PLN: Do you have any comments you’d like to make about particular movements of the piece?

Nadine Deleury

Nadine Deleury: In the slow movement, I hear a theme from Bernstein’s West Side Story — but of course, Schmitt’s piece came first!

John McLaughlin Williams: I particularly love the second movement.  It’s so typical of Schmitt’s music in that it’s surprising in where it leads.

It defies expectations. It starts out very dreamy in a classic French way, but then it seems to dissolve into something more dissonant and more dramatic.  It’s a sort of an “expressionistic lullaby” — and a very contemporary aspect of Schmitt’s compositional style.

PLN: How would you characterize the musical style of Pour presque tous les temps beyond the general idea that it sounds “French”?

Igor Stravinsky (l.), photographed with Florent Schmitt in about 1910.

Velda Kelly: I definitely hear Poulenc in the music, and I also hear Stravinsky in spots — especially in the last movement with all of the rhythmic complexity and drive that it has.

John McLaughlin Williams: It’s important to mention in that context that Schmitt and Stravinsky were close friends in the early decades of the 20th century — and that Stravinsky counted Schmitt as a great influence during his early years in Paris.  So it may be that the two musicians were influencing each other in a reciprocal way.

PLN: Are there any additional comments you’d like to make about Florent Schmitt and his music?

John McLaughlin Williams: Paralleling how Schmitt was very specific in the effects he wanted to achieve in his music, the composer was also very fastidious in his personal manner and appearance.

There’s a famous photograph taken around the time Pour presque tous les temps was composed.  Schmitt is seated with his longtime friend and fellow-composer Ralph Vaughan Williams.  Schmitt looks very elegant and well-manicured in his custom-tailored suit even as Vaughan Williams looks all scruffy in his English tweeds.  Seeing the stark contrast, it is an apt reflection of Schmitt — the man and the artist.

____________________

Special thanks to these four musicians for taking the time to share their observations about Florent Schmitt and his music.  It was an interesting and informative discussion; there’s no question that the audience was very favorably disposed to the music, heartily applauding both the performance and the subsequent Q&A session about the composer.

Considering the very positive reception Pour presque tous les temps received, other chamber music groups across North America would be well-advised to investigate this composition and add it to their repertoire as well.

Christian Ferras (1933-1982)

To younger music-lovers, the name Christian Ferras may not be well-recognized. But Ferras, who lived from 1933 to 1982, was one of the finest violinists of the 20^th century.

Unfortunately, it was a career cut short by suicide at the age of just 49 years, but during his 25 years on the stage, Christian Ferras established a reputation as an uncommonly fine and insightful violinist.

Even today, Christian Ferras’ interpretations of the concerti of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius and Alban Berg are considered non pareil by many music critics.

Many of the most famous Christian Ferras / Pierre Barbizet recording collaborations have been gathered together in this multi-CD set released on the Brilliant label.

Ferras was also very prolific in performing instrumental music, including the most famous violin sonatas in the repertoire. His keyboard collaborator for much of his career was the pianist Pierre Barbizet, who made many noteworthy recordings with Ferras that remain prized by violin aficionados.

Unfortunately, Christian Ferras suffered from acute depression during most of his life, which surely contributed to an alcohol problem that threatened to derail his career several times. In the mid-1970s the violinist stepped away from performing and touring for a number of years, eventually planning his comeback to the stage.

For his return to performing, Ferras turned to a new keyboard collaborator – the young French-born Canadian pianist and composer Alain Lefèvre – a rising talent who was studying at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris in the class of the esteemed instructor Pierre Sancan.

Pierre Sancan

Sancan was particularly praiseworthy of the young Lefèvre, predicting a great career for the artist.  So it came as no surprise that Ferras would plot his comeback with Lafèvre, beginning with a tour planned for the Iberian Peninsula.

Together with his new pianist, Ferras began preparing an ambitious collection of music for the Iberian tour — repertoire that included Florent Schmitt’s amazing (and incredibly challenging) Sonate libre en deux parties enchaînées, ad modem clementis aquæ, Op. 68. Composed in 1918-19, the Sonate was a work hardly ever programmed — and only then by the most adventuresome musicians.

Alas, the spectacular comeback was not to be. Mere weeks before the beginning of the tour, Christian Ferras ended his own life.

Alain Lefèvre

Decades later, the tragedy still affects Alain Lefèvre, who over a span of just 24 months had developed a deep respect and affection for a man whose talents he admired so much.  That was clear in an interview I was privileged to have with the pianist following a concert with the Virginia Symphony Orchestra where he performed the 1946 Fourth Piano Concerto of the Québécois composer André Mathieu (Lefèvre has been an ardent champion of Mathieu’s music for more than 30 years).

Walter Boudreau

Indeed, the pianist has been blessed with a highly successful international career, performing solo, chamber and orchestral performances on every continent. He presents the “core” piano repertoire while also championing less-familiar creations by musicians such as Mathieu and another Canadian composer, Walter Boudreau.  Recently, Lefèvre signed with Warner Classics, for which he will be making a substantial number of new recordings covering a range of varied repertoire.

My interview with Alain Lefèvre, a gregarious and open-hearted gentleman, was thoroughly engaging and informative. Highlights of the discussion are presented below.

PLN: During your days as a student at the Paris Conservatoire, how did your paths cross with Christian Ferras?

A photo of pianist Alain Lefèvre, taken at the time of his arrival in Paris in 1979.

AL: That’s an interesting story.  In a few words, I came to Paris in 1979.  Shortly thereafter I was asked to participate in a piano competition in Milan.  It went very well and I won the prize.  Following that, Radio-France engaged me for a piano recital that was part of the prize.  I remember that I played pieces by Rachmaninov and Chopin, plus a piano prelude by André Mathieu.

Christian Ferras, who was the violin teacher of my brother Gilles, listened to that radio broadcast. Evidently he was impressed, because he came to my brother and said, “Listen, I want to make my comeback, but I cannot make my comeback with Pierre Barbizet because that will remind me too much of my bad habits.”  (Ferras had had tremendous troubles with alcoholism.) 

Ferras decided that he wanted to do his comeback with me as his pianist. The first piece I performed with him was the Bach Sonata for Violin and Piano, at the Salle Gaveau in Paris.  So that was my first contact and activity with him.

The Salle Gaveau concert notice (March 1982).

PLN: How did you come to study and prepare Florent Schmitt’s Sonate libre with him?

Pianist Alain Lefèvre’s student digs in the 17th arrondissement of Paris (2 Square Emmanuel Chabrier). To reach Lefèvre’s “chamber de bonne” would require Christian Ferras and other visitors to enter via the back door of the building.

AL: It was the same process.  Ferras proposed doing that piece.  Imagine the picture: At 18 years of age I was a poor student, living in a little room at 2 Square Emmanuel Chabrier in Paris.  And here was the great Christian Ferras – the Ferras of the fantastic Sibelius Violin Concerto recording, which is considered the best one by so many people – and also Ferras, the champion of new music – the man who gave the French premiere of the Alban Berg Violin Concerto. 

He proposed preparing music for us to take on tour in Spain and Portugal, to which I replied, “Maître, of course!” 

For the tour we prepared the great violin sonatas – the Beethoven #7, Beethoven #5, the Grieg, the Lekeu and the Franck. But Ferras also wanted to include music that isn’t performed so often.  He wanted to do the Bartók.  And he said, “I want to take time to work the Schmitt two-movement Sonate as well.” 

Pierre Sancan, photographed during the time he mentored the young Alain Lefèvre at the Paris Conservatoire (1980-82).

Immediately I thought of what my piano teacher, the great Pierre Sancan, had told me about Florent Schmitt’s piano music – about how terribly difficult it is!  

But Ferras was adamant. And so we started preparing together, in my little room.  We worked on the Grieg, the two Beethoven, the Franck, the Bartók – and then we started on the Schmitt.

PLN: What do you think attracted Christian Ferras to the Sonate libre?

AL: Ferras felt that it was too repetitious to perform only the same violin repertoire that’s always presented – Beethoven, Brahms, Franck, blah-blah-blah.  He was coming out of a pretty terrible period in his life and he wanted to do something more than just the standard pieces. 

To Ferras, Florent Schmitt was a musical genius, and he was concerned that Schmitt’s music wasn’t played as often as it should be. He said to me, “You know, many people incorrectly judge the music of Schmitt as too Germanophile.” 

When we started to work on the piece for the tour, it was absolutely fantastic.

PLN: What were your own impressions of the Sonate libre when you first encountered it?

AL: For me, it was enormous work.  People always say that the Franck Sonata is challenging for the pianist.  That say that the Bartók is difficult for the piano.  But those pieces are nothing when compared to the Schmitt. 

The Sonate libre is amazingly difficult – not just technically, but also in the way that it’s played.  The piano should never be “above” the violin. 

There’s also a lot of “mystique” in the piece, and Ferras and I tried to understand that, too. The music is like a tapestry.

PLN: So, how did the rehearsing work out?

A young Alain Lefèvre, photographed during the time he worked with violinist Christian Ferras.

AL: We worked and worked on that piece, getting it into shape.  But just two or three weeks before we were to start on our tour, Ferras committed suicide.  Just 49 years old.  It was very sad. 

So, the tour never happened. It’s difficult to speak about it even today without getting emotional. 

Many times, I’ve thought that I should have recorded my rehearsals with Ferras, because they were so extraordinary.  He would tell me, “Alain, I’m not playing well today.”  But in reality, his playing was fantastic.   

The intelligence of the man – the playing and the sound that he brought to the Schmitt Sonate in particular – it was unbelievable.  I don’t want to speak ill of the recordings that exist of this music, but his playing was in a different league.

A vintage copy of the score to Florent Schmitt’s Sonate libre, inscribed by pianist Alain Lefèvre.

PLN: Do you know if Christian Ferras had performed the Sonate libre before you began to work on it with him?

AL: We haven’t found evidence that he performed this music in recital, based on the program booklets that have survived.  But there are people who are quite sure that Ferras did play this music at some point.   

I suspect so as well, because when we rehearsed together, Ferras would point out certain things, noting how certain parts of the score were particularly difficult or tricky. From this, I know for sure that he knew the Sonate – that he had studied it even if he’d never performed it in public.

PLN: For decades there was just one commercial recording available of the Sonate libre, made in the late 1950s. But in recent years there has been more interest in this music, and the newest commercial recording, due out in November, will be the fifth one of the piece.  To what do you attribute this increase in interest?

Alain Lefèvre at the piano with the score to Florent Schmitt’s Sonate libre (2018).

AL: Honestly, I think it is a sin that this music went for so long not being heard and that performers didn’t put more energy into presenting this piece – or any music by this composer, for that matter. 

Of course, concert managers often think that only familiar repertoire will fill the hall. But I feel differently.  Schmitt can do that as well.  Not long ago, I presented the Buffalo Philharmonic’s recording of Schmitt’s Antoine et Cléopâtre on my Canadian classical music radio show.  A number of people wrote to me, thanking me for helping them discover music that they found out was so amazing.  So, I think we have to fight for this kind of music. 

I just signed a recording contract with Warner Classics, and together we are planning to release new recordings that feature the repertoire I played with Ferras, since I was his last pianist. I hope that the Schmitt will be one of those pieces — most likely with a violinist who is on the current artists’ roster of the label.

PLN: That brings me to another question:  Even though you didn’t have the chance to present the Sonate libre with Christian Ferras, have you performed the music since then?

An Artur Rubinstein masterclass (Israel, 1980).

AL: Yes, I did so shortly thereafter – but it was a private performance.  It was in a salon as part of a master class with Artur Rubinstein along with an audience of about 30 students and other musicians.  My brother Gilles and I performed one movement of the Sonate libre.  Considering that it was in front of the great Rubinstein, I can tell you that it was a very tense moment and I was certainly sweating!

PLN: Do you have future plans to perform the Sonate libre in public?

AL: The first plan would be to record the piece.  It would be a great dream to record it with Warner Classics.  I’m certainly looking forward to making a recording with a violinist who can do the piece justice – giving the music all the attention and dignity that it deserves. 

After that, who knows? But I would love to perform this music wherever I can.

___________________

We are particularly pleased to learn that Alain Lefèvre is making plans to record the Sonate libre so many decades following his collaboration with Christian Ferras — and we’re equally grateful to him for sharing his personal memories of that special collaboration from long ago.

A page from the manuscript for Florent Schmitt’s Musiques intimes (Book 2), signed and dated by the composer (September 1902).

Florent Schmitt may be best-known for his opulent orchestral scores, most of which were written in the first three decades of the 20th century. But Schmitt’s compositional career, which spanned more than seven decades beginning in the late 1880s, contains so much more than just those creations.

Taking a look at the composer’s extensive catalogue — some 138 items plus additional works without opus numbers — we notice a preponderance of vocal and piano music produced early in the composer’s career. The large quantity of such scores shouldn’t be surprising, considering that the piano was Schmitt’s own primary instrument.

In these early works, the composer’s unique style isn’t fully on display, and influences of other composers — most notably Schumann, Chopin and Fauré — are certainly evident. Still, these works are full of musical imagination and are highly rewarding taken on their own terms.

Two charming sets of piano miniatures that date from this early period are the Musiques intimes.  The composer created two “books” of pieces, each made up of six numbers.  Book 1 was composed between 1891 and 1900 and was published by Heugel in 1901.  As such, the music pre-dates Schmitt’s Prix de Rome period (1900-04), during which time the composer traveled extensively throughout Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, gathering up new musical influences along the say.

The six movements of Musiques intimes (Book 1), Op. 16 are as follows:

• Aux Rochers de Naye (At Rochers de Naye Mountain)
• Sur le chemin désert (On a Desert Road)
• Silence troublé (Troubled Silence)
• Promenade au Lido (Walk to the Lido)
• Dans la forêt ensoleillée (In a Sunny Forest)
• Chanson des feuilles (Song of the Leaves)

Ivo Kaltchev

In the words of the Ivo Kaltchev, the Bulgarian-American pianist who has made the only commercial recording of Book 1, these six pieces fall firmly within in the 19th century tradition of pianism. Kaltchev writes:

“The focus of these miniatures, influenced by Faure [who was] Florent Schmitt’s composition teacher at the Paris Conservatoire, is on Romantic sensitivity, expressive harmony, and Schumannesque pedal effects.”

The subject matter of each of the movements in Book 1 seems completely in keeping with the character of so many “salon” piano pieces being published at the end of the 19th century. In describing them, the words of the composer Pierre-Octave Ferroud (and Schmitt’s student) have particular resonance:

“… Refreshing reveries in the midst of a peaceful nature from which cares are missing … where there is no trouble for the morrow, when life is easy, eventless and happy.”

Collectively, the six pieces that make up Book I of Musiques intimes are fewer than 12 minutes in length, and for the most part the music poses few technical challenges for performers.

French pianist Marguerite Long (1874-1966), photographed in about 1900.

Although historical documentation is somewhat sketchy, it appears that the famed pianist Marguerite Long performed these pieces as early as 1907, but whether her presentation was actually the premiere outing of this music is difficult to ascertain. It is possible — even likely — that various numbers in Book 1 received other public performances prior to when Marguerite Long took them up.

Several years were to elapse between the publication of Book 1 and the appearance of a second set of pieces under the name Musiques intimes (Book 2), Op. 29.  The six pieces that make up Book 2 were composed between 1898 and 1904, meaning that several of the numbers in this set were created during Schmitt’s time at the Villa Medici in Rome.

The six pieces that make up Book 2 are as follows:

• Cloître (Cloister)
• Sillage (Sea-wake)
• Brises (Breezes)
• Lac (The Lake)
• Poursuite (Pursuit)
• Glas (Knell)

The original manuscript for the “Cloître” movement of Florent Schmitt’s Musiques intimes (Book 2), prepared in the composer’s characteristically precise, meticulous handwriting.

As in Book 1, these pieces are introspective in their mood (with the exception of Poursuite) … and yet, as Ivo Kaltchev has written:

“The coloristic harmonic language marks a further stylistic development into impressionism. Here, in addition to the familiar impressionistic devices such as modality, parallelism, ostinatos, shimmering arpeggio figurations, etc., one can easily notice the characteristic features that would become a signature of Schmitt’s piano idiom:  contrapuntal textures, an orchestral approach to the instrument, and complex rhythmic designs.”

The greater musical complexity of the six pieces that make up Book 2 contributes to the length of the composition — 16 minutes as compared to 12 for Book 1. Moreover, the music is more technically challenging for pianists — and more virtuosic in places.

Book 2 of Musique intimes was published by Mathot/Salabert in 1912, nearly a decade following the work’s completion.  In the meantime, its various movements were premiered by different pianists such as Marthe Dron and Ariane Hugon.

Alain Raës

The two sets of Musiques intimes haven’t achieved the same degree of awareness and popularity as Soirs, another early Schmitt collection of piano pieces.  Part of the reason may be that while the composer orchestrated Soirs — as he did much of his other piano music — he did not do so for either set of Musiques intimes.

First recording of Musiques intimes Book 2: Alain Raës (1985).

Despite its relative obscurity, thankfully we do have several fine recordings of this music.  The French pianist Alain Raës recorded Book 2 in 1985. It was released on the FY label as part of a 2-LP anthology of Florent Schmitt’s piano music.

Unfortunately, while most of the original recording’s music was reissued in the CD era, the Musiques intimes Book 2 wasn’t among them, due to space constraints on the compact disc.  As a result, this recording of Book 2 isn’t easy to find.

First recording of both sets of Musiques intimes: Ivo Kaltchev (2001).

Ivo Kaltchev recorded both Book 1 and Book 2 of Musiques intimes in 2001. His highly idiomatic performances were released on the Gega label, and both sets have also been uploaded to YouTube. Book 1 can be heard here, while Book 2 has been uploaded along with displaying the sheet music, so listeners can follow along with the score.

Anne Queffélec

In addition to these commercial recordings, a number of French pianists have made it a point to include various numbers from Musique intimes as part of their recital programs.  One such pianist is Anne Queffélec.  Her 2014 performance of the final piece in Book 2 (Glas) at Oji Hall in Tokyo, Japan was captured on audio and is available to hear on YouTube.

But even with the advocacy of some pianists, there’s no question these charming miniatures deserve to be better-known — and championed by more pianists. Each of the pieces in both sets is its own special gem, and collectively the music is represents pianism on a high level.  Hopefully, more performers will add Musiques intimes to their recital repertoire and present its charms to more audiences around the world.

Regular readers of the Florent Schmitt Website + Blog know that sometimes we “relax the routine” and publish an article that focuses on a different composer – usually a contemporary of Schmitt.

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)

Of the many fellow composers who Schmitt interacted with during his lengthy career, one with whom he shared an enduring professional and personal bond was Maurice Ravel. The two artists were born just five years apart – Schmitt in 1870 and Ravel in 1875 – and were fellow-students at the Paris Conservatoire.  Thus, they found themselves inextricably linked together in the musical life of Paris in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Florent Schmitt and Maurice Ravel made their U.K. performing debut in 1909 on the very same program at Wigmore Hall in London. Both composers performed their own piano works and accompanied vocalists.

Early on, we find the two composers collaborating in performances of their piano music – including a trip to London in 1909 during which they presented their piano duo compositions together in recital at Bechstein (now Wigmore) Hall.

Schmitt and Ravel were also founding members of the Société des Apaches, a group of French musicians, painters and writers formed in 1900 who represented the more non-conformist strains of Parisian artistic society.  In addition to Ravel and Schmitt, members of the group included composers such as Manuel de Falla and Igor Stravinsky as well as literary figures like Léon-Paul Fargue.

Les Apaches (1910), a painting by Georges d’Espagnat. Florent Schmitt is pictured at far left; Maurice Ravel is at far right.

There have been several accounts written about the time Ravel announced to his circle of Apache friends that it was impossible to write effectively for piano anymore.  Florent Schmitt then proceeded to create his remarkable Les Lucioles (Fireflies, Op. 23, No. 2) in reaction to Ravel’s contention, which subsequently prompted Ravel to compose his famous Jeux d‘eau.  This incident illustrates how closely linked these two figures were in day-to-day Parisian musical life – and how each fed off of the other’s inspiration.

As a prominent music critic over a span of three decades, Florent Schmitt had many opportunities to comment on performances of Ravel’s compositions. At the premiere of Ravel’s Rapsodie espagnole in 1908, the second movement (Malagueña) was met with a hostile reaction in some quarters of the audience.  In response, Schmitt was heard calling from the gallery, “Once more, for the ladies and gentlemen below who haven’t understood!”

The admiration was mutual. Following the premiere performance of Florent Schmitt’s monumental Psaume XLVII on the day after Christmas in 1906, Ravel wrote to the composer, “My dear Schmitt, your Psalm is so profound and so powerful, it nearly shattered the concert hall!”

[Interestingly, Schmitt was less sanguine about Ravel’s most famous piece – the Boléro – characterizing that creation as “a unique error in the career of the artist least subject to error.”]

With the benefit of hindsight, we can now recognize just how significant the artistic output of both composers was in the realm of music. Ravel is much better known, but both composers’ oeuvres reflect, in the words of musicologist Jerry Rife, “a bold and colorful depiction of what is surely the most vibrant and exciting period in the history of French music.”

Esa-Pekka Salonen

Certainly, the compelling attraction of Ravel’s captivating scores has influenced and inspired successive generations of musicians.  Very likely, many would agree with the view of conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen who has observed, “Today, the future of classical music has a lot to do with Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky, and less to do with Schönberg, Berg and Webern.”

Michael Feingold

Undoubtedly, one of those in agreement is Michael Feingold, an orchestrator whose artistic journey has taken him from the world of rock/pop to classical music – in particular the music of France’s “golden age” as characterized by Dr. Rife. Indeed, since 2014, he has orchestrated no fewer than twenty Ravel compositions that were created originally for piano or voice.

I became aware of Michael Feingold’s activities through mutual acquaintances, and I’ve found his personal journey from “rock musician” to “Ravel specialist” quite fascinating. Recently, I had the opportunity to ask him about that journey.  Highlights of our discussion are presented below.

PLN: Please tell us about your musical background, and how you came to be interested in the works of Maurice Ravel.  What was the “spark”?

MEF: To answer that, I guess we need to dip back to my early years.  I began playing guitar around the age of 12, being fascinated by Jimi Hendrix and “grunge” music then playing on MTV.  I played guitar in various bands beginning at the age of 15, and “gigging” on the weekends while still in high school.  I was playing with mostly older musicians.

Queen Latifah (Photo ©Dee Cercone, 2016)

After high school I attended Berklee College of Music in Boston for two years, studying guitar. While at Berklee I started playing at a historic jazz club called Wally’s Café – well-known as a breeding ground for young musicians.  Those experiences led to my first tour in 2005 when I received the call to play guitar backing Queen Latifah.  After that tour I moved to Los Angeles and began my professional touring and recording career with artists like Jay-Z, The Roots, Erykah Badu and Kanye West. 

Jay-Z at Carnegie Hall (Photo ©Kevin Mazur, 2012)

After about a decade of touring the world with these pop artists, I began to want something more for myself, and that slowly led to orchestration. I think a pivotal moment for me was when I was playing guitar for Jay-Z at Carnegie Hall.  I helped out a tiny bit with a few of the arrangements, and in that moment I realized that I preferred being the orchestrator to being the guitar player! 

Erykah Badu (2011 Photo)

As for the Ravel “spark,” I remember being in France and purchasing a few Ravel scores – then sitting under a tree in the countryside outside Lyon before a concert with Erykah Badu, just reading them and trying to imagine all of the sounds inside of the pages.

Studying those Ravel scores really got my orchestration juices flowing.   

My main studies in orchestration have been with Alan Belkin, who taught at the Université de Montréal – and through a few degrees of separation, with musicians who studied with the great Nadia Boulanger.

Alan Belkin

I attribute the most precious aspects of my craft to Alan’s teaching and guidance.  Given that he taught the fundamental elements of the French aesthetic, I learned a great deal about refinement, clarity and transparency using pure colors.  I consider these to be quintessentially “French” aspects of musicality; I hope I’m not stereotyping!

PLN: Beyond Alan Belkin, are there other mentors or musicians who have been influential in your development as an orchestrator?

Claus Ogerman (1930-2016)

MEF: As far as harmonic influence, I’d have to say the German-American composer and arranger Claus Ogerman.  His harmonies just knock me over – particularly his Lyric Suite and Elegia. 

PLN: Returning to Ravel, can you tell us a bit more about how his music speaks to you so compellingly?

MEF: I became interested in Ravel firstly as a listener. I remember spending many hours on the tour bus listening to his piano pieces while looking out the window.  Perhaps it was an antidote to the kind of music I was playing on tour, but I found Ravel’s harmonies to be so elegant and wonderful, and his musical architecture and form unusually airtight and indestructible. 

Later, as I continued my studies in orchestration, I kept going back to Ravel’s scores, admiring them for their craftsmanship and attention to detail. I really worked to absorb how he’d put everything together – line by line. 

What I discovered in the process was that nothing in Ravel’s orchestrations is left to chance, and the result is the kind of perfection that’s rarely encountered – even in classical music. 

This initial exposure led to a desire to acquire Ravel’s handwritten manuscripts, where I could compare the printed scores to what the composer had originally created. And there were numerous discrepancies, as it turned out. 

PLN: Are there other French composers from the same era that captivate you as much as Ravel?

Charles Koechlin (1867-1950)

MEF: Charles Koechlin has been a big influence on me as an orchestrator.  I’ve carefully studied all four volumes of his treatise on orchestration and I’m a better orchestrator because of it.  Koechlin was a very giving teacher and left no stone unturned in terms of explaining the craft. 

Through Ravel and Koechlin, I also discovered Florent Schmitt, Louis Aubert, Marcel Tournier and Maurice Delage, not to mention the earlier generation of French masters including Massenet, Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Chabrier and Andre Gédalge. Taken as a whole it is an uncommonly wonderful musical heritage – France’s gift to the world.

PLN: Let’s turn to your activity with the Ravel orchestrations.  When did this work begin for you?

MEF: My work on the Ravel orchestrations began in the fall of 2014 when I moved back to the East Coast from Los Angeles.  The first piece that I transcribed for orchestra was a prelude the composer had created in 1913 for students’ sight-reading testing at the Paris Conservatoire.  In preparing that particular orchestration, the harmony and simplicity reminded me very much of Ma Mère l’oye, so my model was that piece. 

Michael Feingold’s home and studio in the Berkshire Mountains of rural Western Massachusetts. The architecturally significant, historic house is the perfect environment for his orchestration activities, including the preparation of twenty Ravel scores. The cat in the photo is named Mouni, after Ravel’s own cat.

That prelude was the first of twenty Ravel compositions that I’ve now orchestrated. As I’ve worked on each one, I’m reminded again and again that Ravel was one of the greatest orchestrators who ever lived – perhaps even the single best one.   

It’s quite daunting – and humbling – to orchestrate anything by Ravel. How does one do better than Ravel – or even approach that level of artistry and craftsmanship?  I just try for clarity, refinement and “polish on top of polish” as I suspect Ravel would have done.

PLN: Do you have a particular favorite among all of the Ravel orchestrations that you’ve prepared?

MEF: I think I’m most happy with Sur l’herbe.  All of the original piano textures in that 1907 composition are very orchestral in nature.  I’ve often wondered why Ravel didn’t choose to orchestrate it himself.

The first page of Michael Feingold’s orchestration of Maurice Ravel’s 1907 composition Sur l’herbe, prepared in 2016.

PLN: This endeavor seems so important – not just the new orchestrations but also the work you’ve done in identifying copyist errors in Ravel’s published scores …

MEF: Indeed it is!  My work in tracking errors in the printed editions began as a study exercise, but now I see it as highly valuable to anyone wanting to prepare critical editions of the music.  I’ve collected every Ravel manuscript I can find from various collections.  In the process, I’ve discovered so many errors and discrepancies – including ones that are even missed in critical editions. 

Michael Feingold working in his studio in the Berkshires.

In addition to that effort, I’ve also been focusing on writing about Ravel’s orchestration style. One such endeavor focuses on his orchestration preferences, including his treatment of color and clarity. 

The other focuses on how Ravel orchestrated his own piano music (as well as the piano works of other composers such as Debussy’s Danse and Sarabande), and examines specific gestures using a before/after side-by-side analysis from piano to orchestra.  My tentative title for that book is Textures & Gestures of Maurice Ravel. 

I feel that there is a void in Ravel’s published orchestrations in that the original piano parts aren’t displayed at the bottom of the page — the one exception being the Arbie Orenstein Eulenberg edition of Pictures at an Exhibition.  As an orchestrator, seeing the two together is highly valuable because you can really discern what Ravel was thinking about in the instrumentation. 

I have already prepared many of the works in this fashion as a learning aid, and I hope to publish them at some point with Francois Dru as part of his wonderful Ravel Edition series produced in concert with Les Amis de Maurice Ravel. 

I’d also like to mention that I’m very grateful for the generous aid I’ve received in my endeavors from a cadre of eminent Ravel scholars.  In addition to Arbie Orenstein they include Manuel Cornejo, Stephen Zank, Yegor Shevtsov and Emily Kilpatrick.

PLN: Are there certain orchestra conductors on the scene today who you feel are particularly effective in conveying an authentic Ravel style in their interpretations? 

Stéphane Denève

MEF: I love Stéphane Denève‘s artistry, along with Leonard Slatkin and François-Xavier Roth.  I own all of their recordings of Ravel’s works.

PLN: Going beyond Ravel, I understand that you have also been engaged in a project regarding the Durand published editions.  Can you tell me about that initiative?

MEF: The goal of this project is to create a faithful reproduction of the Durand et fils “house style” of published music scores.  For the past three years I’ve been working to re-create the famous Durand “look”, which is so elegant and inviting when compared to the house styles of other publishing firms.  As you know, Durand was the publisher all of the French composers we all adore – Debussy, Ravel, Florent Schmitt, Roussel, Aubert and so many others. 

I consider this project highly important because Durand abandoned that “house style” long ago, and there exists no commercial music or text fonts from that bygone era. To resurrect it has been an exhaustive “labor of love,” to say the least!

PLN: It does sound like an arduous endeavor.  Tell us more about how you’ve approached this work.

A vintage copy of the score to Maurice Ravel’s L’Heure espagnole, published by Durand (1911).

MEF: I began with a rare first edition of Ravel’s L’Heure espagnole, published by Durand in 1911.  Actually, I obtained two copies of that first edition, including one that had belonged to the American composer David Diamond who had been a friend of Ravel’s.  (That edition also contained a few notes in Diamond’s own hand regarding Ravel’s orchestration.) 

The approach was to scan each individual musical glyph at high resolution (note heads, stems, clefs, lines, numbers and so forth). This was done five times over.  Out of the five “specimens” scanned, the next step would be placing and tracing them in a software program, and lastly placing them into Sibelius notation software. 

But it’s more involved than even that. In addition to creating all of the music and text fonts, one has to be “scientific” about carefully studying all of the spacings and line thicknesses, the angle of the beams and so many other factors that go into re-creating the Durand “house look.” 

Matthew Maslanka

Needless to say, this is a project that’s taken a number of years to complete. In its infant stages, it was just myself and my wonderful copyist collaborator, the New York City-based music engraver Matthew Maslanka. 

Later on, I met Jawher Matmati, a Tunisian musician now residing in Belgium who shared our love for the Durand “house style” and who had already begun to create his own music font.   

Jawher Matmati

He and I began collaborating on the laborious steps in the process. We enlisted a fourth person – Wesselin Christoph Karaatanassov in Bulgaria – a music engraver who would trace our scans using software.  When that task was complete, it would go to Jawher who would place each individual glyph into Sibelius along with scaling it properly. 

It was a truly transnational endeavor.

An example of the re-creation of the Durand “house style.” The project been multi-year effort involving a transnational team of experts led by Michael Feingold.

PLN: Where can we see applications of the re-created Durand “house style” today? 

The Ravel Boléro Edition, published in 2018.

MEF: For the moment, I have been using it for my own orchestrations of Ravel’s music and for demonstrating examples in the books I’m writing. 

It was also used at the beginning of preparing a new book about Ravel’s Boléro, published this year in collaboration with Les Amis de Maurice Ravel — but that project took a different direction in the midst of production. 

I also see the Durand house style being highly valuable for anyone who wishes to engrave music that presents that classic look. For instance, if there was a Florent Schmitt composition that only existed in manuscript form – such as his Prix de Rome cantata submissions, the early Ramayana-inspired symphonic poem Combat de Rakshasas et délivrance de Sitâ or the large-scale choral work Fête de la lumière that inaugurated the nightly light-and-water shows at the Paris Exposition in 1937 – using this re-created Durand “house style” would be 100% faithful to the period. 

François Dru

Incidentally, when I showed the results of our efforts to François Dru, the editor of the new Boléro book who had also once worked for the Durand-Salabert-Eschig publishing firm, his jaw dropped!

PLN: What are your future musical plans and projects regarding Maurice Ravel and beyond?

Conrad Pope

MEF: I still have a foot in the R&B and pop music world.  I continue to work extensively in film and videogame orchestration, including as the lead orchestrator for Bungie’s Destiny series.  

In film, my biggest influence is probably Conrad Pope who has prepared orchestrations for John Williams, Alexandre Desplat, James Newton Howard, Danny Elfman and others.  To me, Conrad is the Ravel of film orchestrators – and he’s also been kind enough to answer the occasional questions from me as I’ve worked in this realm. 

I’ve just been notified that an album I cowrote and performed on, titled Chris Dave and The Drumhedz, has been nominated for this year’s GRAMMY^® award as “Best Urban Contemporary Album.” 

I also have plans to continue teaching privately, which I have done for some time now. 

Maison Ravel (Montfort l’Amaury, France)

On the Ravel front, my most immediate objective is to take a sabbatical from my other activities, rent a house near Monfort l’Amaury where Ravel lived, and complete my Ravel books. I would also love to examine the microfilm documentation of the Taverne Collection at the Bibliothèque National de France, which contains so many of Ravel’s most rare and remarkable manuscripts.   

Beyond this, a longer-term dream is to have my Ravel orchestrations performed in some capacity as individual pieces or as a full program, and I would also love to see them published as a collection.

_________________

Considering Michael Feingold’s considerable efforts on behalf of a universally beloved composer who left us relatively few orchestral works, it would be excellent indeed if his new Ravel orchestrations could be made available for conductors and orchestras to perform. The list below shows all twenty of these orchestrations, ordered by their year of original composition:

• Sérénade grotesque (1892-93)
• Ballade de la reine morte d’aimer (1893)
• Un grand sommeil noir (1895)
• Sainte (1896)
• Si morne (1898)
• Jeux d’eau (1901)
• Manteau de fleurs (1903)
• Menuet in C# Minor (1904)
• Les grands vents venus d’outre-mer (1906)
• Sur l’herbe (1907)
• Le gibet (from Gaspard de la nuit) (1908)
• Menuet sur le nom de Haydn (1909)
• Tripatos (1909)
• À la manière de Borodine (1912-13)
• À la manière de Chabrier (1912-13)
• Prélude (1913)
• Trois chansons (1914-15)
• Berceuse sur le nom de Gabriel Fauré (1922)
• Ronsard à son âme (1923-24)
• Rêves (1927)

The first page of the score for Florent Schmitt’s harpsichord suite Clavecin obtempérant, composed in 1945 for Marcelle de Lacour.

Over a lengthy career spanning more than seven decades, French composer Florent Schmitt created numerous works that showcased the special qualities of various different instruments — including some that are not so often the “featured celebrities” in scores.

As an accomplished keyboard artist, it’s no surprise that the composer’s catalogue of works contains many entries featuring the piano. But Schmitt also explored the sonorities of the harpsichord.  Indeed, one of his best-known chamber music compositions — the Sonatine en trio from 1936 — was originally published in a version for flute, clarinet and harpsichord.  (Later versions prepared by Schmitt included one for flute/clarinet/piano and one for violin/cello/piano.)

In addition to possessing a commercial recording of Schmitt’s harpsichord version of the Sonatine en trio, I’ve had the good fortune to see the harpsichord version of this piece performed in concert on two occasions, so I have first-hand knowledge of that version’s effectiveness — both in sight and sound.

Marcelle de Lacour, photographed at the beginning of her musical career (1920s).

A decade following the appearance of the Sonatine en trio, Florent Schmitt returned to the harpsichord for a new work — this time creating a four-movement suite for solo instrument that Schmitt composed for the esteemed French harpsichord soloist and teacher Marcelle de Lacour.

As a student of the great Wanda Landowska and as an artist who would live a full century (1896-1997), Mme. de Lacour was one of the best harpsichord performers and teachers France has ever produced. She was active on the Parisian musical scene beginning in the mid-1920s, as well as serving as a professor at the Paris Conservatoire beginning in 1955.

In the 1940s and 1950s Mme. de Lacour was also active as a performing artist, appearing with the most important Parisian orchestras as well as in recital with other prominent musicians, including members of the Pasquier Trio, the flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal and the oboist Pierre Pierlot.

Marcelle de Lacour in later life (1990s).

Naturally, she excelled in music of the Baroque and Classical periods — particularly French repertoire such as Lully, Couperin and Rameau. But perhaps even more consequential was her involvement with contemporary music — including championing new repertoire created for her to perform.

Indeed, the list of composers who created works for Marcelle de Lacour is impressive — some 70 artists, chief among them Bohuslav Martinů, Alexandre Tansman, Jean Langlais, George Migot, Paul Ladmirault … and Florent Schmitt.  (In addition, she prepared harpsichord arrangements of the music of Poulenc, Honegger, Ibert, Koechlin, Villa-Lobos and Bartók, among others.)

Thierry Escaich (Photo: Sébastien Erome)

A decade after her passing, the foundation bearing the name of Marcelle de Lacour and her husband, Robert, inaugurated a competition for new harpsichord compositions.  The aim of the competition is to continue promoting the contemporary relevance of the instrument as Mme. de Lacour had done in her own day.

As French organist and composer Thierry Escaich, artistic director of the Foundation at the time of the first competition in 2007, has written:

“Like the organ, the harpsichord can aspire to find a place in future creativity, while continuing to set forth the musical heritage of which it is part.”

Wanda Landowska (1879-1959), photographed at the harpsichord in 1937.

The piece that Florent Schmitt created for Marcelle de Lacour in 1945 is an absolutely fascinating composition. It is a four-movement suite bearing the tongue-in-cheek name Clavecin obtempérant, Op. 107 (“The Ill-Tempered Clavier”).  The title is a riff on Johann Sebastian Bach’s harpsichord magnum opus, the Well-Tempered Clavier — some 48 preludes and fugues that were reintroduced to modern audiences early in the 20th century by Marcelle de Lacour’s famous teacher, Wanda Landowska.

[This wasn’t the only time that Florent Schmitt would apply clever or ironic names to his compositions.  Another cheeky example is his 1955 quartet Pour presque tous les temps (“Quartet for Almost All the Time”) — a play on Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time — and of a completely different character compared to Messiaen’s creation.]

Marcelle de Lacour gave the first performance of Clavecin obtempérant at a Société National de Musique recital on February 26, 1946.  A dozen years later the harpsichordist entered the studios of French National Radio and performed the work for national broadcast (on July 11, 1957).

More than likely, the by-then-elderly Schmitt was in attendance at that performance, giving it a certain official imprimatur.

The Forgotten Records release of Florent Schmitt’s Clavecin obtempérant (December 2018).

Clavecin obtempérant has never been recorded commercially, but fortunately for us the 1957 RTF broadcast performance has resurfaced after more than 60 years and has now been released by Forgotten Records, the classical label that has resurrected many commercial recordings as well as historic broadcast performances — over 1,500 offerings at last count — in addition to releasing newly recorded material.

Having had the opportunity hear Clavecin obtempérant at last, I find that it is an utterly amazing composition.  The 15-minute piece is in four movements that unfold as follows:

I.  Modéré et très rythmé

II.  Vif

III. Un peu lent

IV.  Animé

One could characterize the music as “poly-everything.”  It is polytonal and polyrhythmic — rooted in tonality but with things always a little askew. The musical language is muscular yet very “French,” and it’s utterly fascinating in the way the musical arguments are presented … then broken apart and put back together again.

Even the slow third movement — which in many of Schmitt’s compositions is where he comes closest to capturing the spirit of his teacher and mentor Gabriel Faure — is one with a distinctly ironic edge to it.

And the final chord in the last movement — a sort of musical stick in the ribs — underscores further the “wink-wink-nudge-nudge” character of the music.  This is an “ill-tempered clavier” indeed — but it’s not unlike the ornery relative one encounters in nearly every family — you know, the person who is endlessly interesting even as he or she tests everyone’s patience.

One of the volumes in RCA Victor’s 6-LP set of the complete Bach Well-Tempered Clavier, recorded by Wanda Landowska (1949-52).

Although I don’t know for sure what kind of harpsichord Marcelle de Lacour used for her 1957 ORTF performance, to my ears it sounds very much like the type of full-bodied Pleyel “revival” instrument utilized by Wanda Landowska when making her RCA Victor 6-LP complete recording Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier.

Musicologists may disagree lustily over whether the choice of a Pleyel model for recording Landowska’s Bach works was the “properly authentic” one, but for a piece like the Florent Schmitt Clavecin obtempérant, it seems like indisputably the right choice.

A Pleyel harpsichord from the 1930s.

I’ve found that Clavecin obtempérant is a robust composition that pays new musical dividends with each subsequent hearing.  There is so much going on in each movement of the suite, it requires multiple auditions for everything to settle in and for the broader narrative of the music to become clear.

Undoubtedly, the piece is a major musical (re)discovery — and one that deserves a place in the repertoire of every serious harpsichord artist.

A handwritten note from Alain Deguernel, founder and head of Forgotten Records, enclosed with the new CD shipped in December 2018.

Marcelle de Lacour’s performance of Clavecin obtempérant is available on a newly issued Forgotten Records release.  The new recording also contains classic 1960 performances of chamber works by Ravel, Roussel and Schmitt as performed by members of the Marie-Claire Jamet Quintet (those selections were originally released on the Erato label).  The disc can be ordered directly from the Forgotten Records website, and the label ships internationally.

Detailed performance and recording information for the Forgotten Records release (December 2018).

My recommendation would be to listen to the recording while following along with the score to Clavecin obtempérant.  See if you aren’t surprised and delighted by rich musical invention in this endlessly fascinating piece of music.

Florent Schmitt (1900 photo)

French composer Florent Schmitt’s abilities as a pianist were considerable. Even so, he characterized the piano as “a convenient but disappointing substitute for the orchestra.”

Taking a look at Schmitt’s piano scores, what’s immediately apparent are the technical demands that are required to do the music justice.  It’s akin to what the French pianist Alfred Cortot famously characterized as Schmitt’s “fistfuls of notes” — no doubt the product of the composer’s predilection to give his piano music an “orchestral” character.

We see those traits in evidence early on in Schmitt’s compositional career. A few very early piano works — such as Soirs, Op. 5 from 1890-96 — are managed easily by pianists with moderate technical playing skills.  There are also the four piano duet sets that Schmitt composed for didactic purposes — Sur cinq notes, Une semaine du petit elfe Ferme-l’oeil, Huit courtes pièces and Trois pièces recréatives.

But beginning in the late 1890s, Schmitt’s piano music began to take on characteristics that would eventually inform nearly all of his creative output: dense writing (often on three staves in his piano scores), polytonal complexity, plus rhythmic vitality coupled with frequently changing time signatures.

A prime example of the transition is Schmitt’s Trois valses nocturnes, Op. 31, a set of three pieces he composed during his Prix de Rome period which came about due to winning the Paris Conservatoire’s prestigious first prize in competition in 1900.  Being a prizewinner afforded Schmitt the opportunity (and the stipend) to spend several years based at the Villa Medici in Rome (along with liberal stretches of travel throughout Europe, North Africa and the Near East for the intrepid composer).

Florent Schmitt’s stay at the Villa Medici in Rome was notable for the amount of time he wasn’t there — instead traveling throughout Germany and Scandinavia, around he Mediterranean and the Near East.

For Prix de Rome winners, their time at the Villa Medici was completely unstructured.  The only proviso was to send periodic envois back to Paris.  For the architects it was architectural designs; for the authors it was their writings.

In the case of Schmitt, his envois consisted of several compositions scored for orchestra and chorus — chief among them the symphonic poem Le Palais hanté, the orchestral suite Musiques de plein air, and the celebrated Psaume XLVII for soprano, chorus, organ and orchestra.

But beyond these works, Schmitt also created numerous piano and vocal envois such as Chansons à quatre voix for vocalists and two pianos, Reflets d’Allemagne for piano duet, Trois rapsodies for two pianos … and Trois valses nocturnes.

The Valses nocturnes represent some of the most engaging piano music ever penned by Florent Schmitt.  The three movements of the set are untitled, but each of them are quite different in character as evidenced by the following tempo markings noted in the score:

• I.   D’une allure assez paisible
• II.  Presque lent
• III. Assez vif

Raoul Pugno (1852-1914)

Each of the movements bears a dedication to a different musical luminary, whose personality is also reflected in the character of each piece. Schmitt dedicated the first movement in the set to Raoul Pugno, a French pianist, organist, teacher and composer who was the first internationally recognized pianist to make recordings (1903).

Alexander Glazunov (1865-1936), photographed in later life during his voluntary exile in Paris.

The second movement bears a dedication to the famous composer Alexander Glazunov. At first blush this seems completely apropos, as Glazunov would leave Russia in the years following the Bolshevik Revolution, never to return — settling in Paris (where he would die in an impecunious state in 1936).

But then we quickly realize that Schmitt’s score dates from several decades earlier — at a time when Glazunov was still a feted composer of the Russian Empire and where his most popular ballet Les Saisons had been mounted at the Imperial Theatre of the Hermitage (Winter Palace) in St. Petersburg just one year prior to Schmitt’s composition.

It is highly doubtful that the young Schmitt had yet made a personal acquaintance with Glazunov (as he most assuredly would do in later years) … and yet the second Valse nocturne has a distinctly Slavic flavor to it — all allowances being made to other stylistic aspects that sound quintessentially French, of course.

Ricardo Viñes (1875-1943), standing at far left, pictured with members of Les Apaches. Maurice Ravel is on the far right.

The third piece in the set was dedicated to the celebrated young French pianist Ricardo Viñes — a childhood friend of Maurice Ravel and famous interpreter of Ravel’s piano scores. Ravel and Viñes were close friends with Schmitt as well, and all three would shortly become important members of Les Apaches, a Parisian group of musicians, artists and writers who were dedicated to championing new ways of artistic expression unshackled from the prevailing aesthetic conventions.

As befits the formidable technique skills of Ricardo Viñes, Schmitt’s piece is virtuosic and makes for a fascinating final movement of the set. And it was Viñes himself who would present the first public performance of Trois valses nocturnes.  The score was published by A. Z. Mathot (later acquired by the Durand publishing house).

Trois valses nocturnes is not a well-known work; more’s the pity because it is such an infectiously appealing composition.  But beyond the surface charm there’s notable harmonic complexity and a remarkable depth of feeling.  As French composer Ginette Keller has written about this creation:

“Working from material that is simple as well as imbued with a characteristically French elegance, through the complexity of polyphonic writing Florent Schmitt manages to convey the impression of an orchestra — yet without sacrificing harmonic subtlety or rhythmic and choreographic mobility.”

Taken together, it makes for a richly rewarding listening experience. Indeed, these are piano creations that never grow old — even with repeated hearings.

Composer and conductor Tony Aubin’s 1953 class at the Paris Conservatoire. Composer Ginette Keller is standing next to Aubin, who is seated at the piano.

Only commercial recording of the full set: Pascal Le Corre (Cybelia, 1986).

Unfortunately, the ability to experience these pieces has been limited. There exists only a single commercial recording ever made of the entire set — done in 1986 by the French pianist Pascal Le Corre.  Released on the Cybelia label, that recording had only limited distribution outside France and has been out of print for decades.

The recording commemorating the 2003 Husum Piano Festival includes Marie-Catherine Girod’s performance of Florent Schmitt’s first Valse nocturne.

I’m fortunate to own a copy of the recording, and I can attest to the fact that Le Corre’s performance is a highly idiomatic and sensitive interpretation.  It’s definitely a recording that merits re-release.

More recently, another fine French pianist, Marie-Catherine Girod, presented the first of the Valse nocturnes at the 2003 Husum Piano Festival.  Her performance was made available on a recording commemorating that year’s festival.  You can listen to that performance here, courtesy of the Pianushko music channel on YouTube.

Marie-Catherine Girod

There’s no question that Florent Schmitt’s Trois valses nocturnes would make a stunning addition to the recitals of a new generation of virtuoso pianists.  Let us hope for that — as well as the availability of new recorded performances in the years ahead.

Visiting with mezzo-soprano Susan Platts (l.) and conductor JoAnn Falletta (r.) at the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra … and discussing the music of Florent Schmitt (March 2019)

In 2020, the NAXOS label plans to release its second disk of music by the French composer Florent Schmitt that features the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and its music director, JoAnn Falletta.

The first recording, which was released in 2015, included several orchestral pieces by Schmitt:  the two Antoine et Cléopâtre suites (after William Shakespeare) and the symphonic etude Le Palais hanté (after Edgar Allan Poe).  That recording was praised by music critics around the world as a significant artistic success.

A notable stage and literary career cut short by the First World War: Robert d’Humiéres (1868-1915).

In March 2019, Falletta and the BPO returned to the microphones to record two of the four Florent Schmitt pieces planned for the 2020 release: La Tragédie de Salomé, Op. 50 (composed in 1907 and revised in 1910, based on a ballet scenario by Robert d’Humières), plus the early art song Musique sur l’eau, Op. 33, set to poetry by the French symbolist writer Albert Samain (composed in 1898 and orchestrated by Schmitt in 1913).

An earlier collaboration: Platts and Falletta record Mahler at the Virginia Arts Festival (2015).

Falletta chose Canadian mezzo-soprano Susan Platts as the solo vocalist in both pieces — an artist with which she has collaborated previously in concert and on recordings.

Underscoring the keen interest in the 2019 Buffalo Philharmonic concerts and recording session, the events attracted visitors from five states who traveled to snowy Buffalo to take in the proceedings.

Traveling in from all over: Music-lovers from five states traveled to Buffalo to experience the Florent Schmitt concerts and recording session at Kleinhans Music Hall (March 2019).

I was privileged to be among the out-of-state guests who came to Buffalo. Moreover, I able to visit with JoAnn Falletta and Susan Platts to ask them about the music they were presenting and recording.  Highlights of our very interesting hour-long conversation are presented below.

PLN: Maestra Falletta, this will be your second album with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra devoted to the music of Florent Schmitt.  Why you have chosen to focus on this particular composer as part of your recording projects for the NAXOS label?

JoAnn Falletta: Our whole NAXOS recording journey is based on finding unfamiliar or lesser-played music of the late-Romantic and post-Romantic era, so I’m always looking for composers who fit that mission.  In these kinds of searches it’s rare to find real gems.  You find lots of wonderful music; you find music that’s interesting — music that should be recorded.  But it’s more rare to find something that’s astonishingly good.

That’s what I’ve discovered with Florent Schmitt’s output — again and again. It’s music that is so sophisticated — and so important in terms of the “next step” in the development French music.

The 2015 NAXOS recording.

In that sense, it’s mystifying to me why he isn’t better-known. Our first CD recording of Schmitt’s music with NAXOS just cemented that in my mind.  This is music that should be known, and should be played often.

La Tragédie de Salomé was the next logical step after the success of the first recording. Salomé may Schmitt’s most admired piece — and no wonder, because it is beautifully written.  To be able to record it for NAXOS is a great honor.

The music is better-known than Antony & Cleopatra, but that doesn’t mean it’s famous.  There isn’t even one person in our orchestra who has played it before — or in most cases even heard of it.  It hasn’t made its way into the mainstream even though it is played more than practically any other piece by the composer.

PLN: The two works being performed and recorded this weekend are scored for voices with the orchestra.  Schmitt wrote many compositions featuring solo vocalists in addition to an extensive amount of choral music, although he never composed an opera.  What are your impressions of how he writes for the voice? 

JoAnn Falletta: It’s rather hard to tell in Salomé, because there it’s essentially a fragment — an oriental siren call of some sort.  It’s probably not typical of Schmitt’s vocal writing, but it’s certainly very effective.

Florent Schmitt photographed in about 1910 — the year he revised his ballet La Tragédie de Salomé, shortening its length by half while substantially augmenting the orchestration. It is this version — dedicated by Schmitt to Igor Stravinsky — that the world knows best.

It must have been quite startling for audiences — all of a sudden hearing a voice from offstage, singing — which is how we plan to perform it in our concerts this weekend. I can’t imagine a more magical moment than to hear a human voice come out of the fabric of the orchestra, because Schmitt overlaps that shimmering voice with the orchestra.

There are recordings where the vocal part is played by an oboe, and some of those are very fine. But for our recording we felt that it needed to be Schmitt’s original concept of actually introducing a voice — which in some ways is a beautiful departure from what was typically being done in orchestral pieces being created at that time.

Of course, we get a much fuller extent of how Schmitt writes for the voice in Musique sur l’eau, which is an absolute jewel.  It is simply a mini-masterpiece.  It’s only five minutes or maybe a little longer, but Schmitt exploits the color of the voice in a beautiful way, utilizing the full tessitura of what a mezzo-soprano can sing.

Even Schmitt’s choice of a mezzo is very seductive — even opulent — and very much in the character of the age in which the piece was composed.

Régine Crespin (1927-2007).

The mezzo is singing about water, but it’s really about an ocean of music, bringing us into a kind of ecstatic world. That moment when she sings “Ecoute — la symphonie” … it’s just stunning.

For me, what’s equally incredible is how Schmitt crafts the accompaniment. For a long time I had access only to the composer’s original version for voice and piano, along with the 1958 radio performance with Régine Crespin and the ORTF which was miked in such a way that only the strings of the orchestra could be heard clearly.  So it was hard to distinguish the colors.

But when you look at the score and rehearse it with the orchestra, you realize what a masterful ear Schmitt had for color — knowing how to lead up to great climaxes and then clear away for the voice. The piece has some very beautiful chamber music-like moments, even with the surges of the orchestra in other places.

JoAnn Falletta’s conductor’s scores for Florent Schmitt’s La Tragédie de Salomé and Musique sur l’eau.

It’s all about color — and this composer’s sense of color was absolutely extraordinary. But Schmitt also knew how to give the voice space at just the right moments while also having the orchestra surge up — like the welling up of water.  It’s beautiful writing for voice, and equally exquisite writing for the orchestra.

It is a perfect five minutes. Even the way the piece ends is perfection:  The singer finishes, and then we have this little instrumental tag that links from one color to the next before the music melts away to nothingness.

Albert Samain, French Symbolist Poet (1858-1900)

When you think about the words to the music, I like how one American writer [Amy Lawrence Lowell] characterizes Albert Samain’s poetry as possessing a “vague magnificence.” And indeed, there’s something unknowable — not only in the poetry but also in the music.  It’s not concrete in any way, and it’s not striving for clarity.

PLN: Musique sur l’eau is an early work, composed in 1898 when the composer was in his 20s. How would you characterize this piece in terms of its style and the era in which it was written?  Does the piece fit stylistically within what we typically think of as the French art song?

Susan Platts: First, it’s amazing when we realize that Schmitt wrote this piece when he was still in his 20s.  It sounds mature; it’s complex.

As for whether it fits within the style of the French art song, I don’t sense this, really. It’s lush music, and when I compare it to Fauré and Debussy and even Ravel, this piece doesn’t fit too well within that corner of the repertoire.

Perhaps because I’ve lived much of my musical life in the world of Mahler, I’m hearing lush romanticism; I’m hearing [Richard] Strauss and Mahler, even if the music is quite different from those composers in so many other ways.

Do you ever feel how that the French art song can sometimes give you the detached sense of being in another room? That isn’t the feeling you get from Musique sur l’eau. There’s real heart in this music.  That’s different from many French art songs where the listener is called upon to “decode” it in some way.

I think of Samain’s poetry as closer in spirit to the French art song than Schmitt’s music is, actually. The piece is presented to you lushly, which is different.  I might differ a little from JoAnn in this view but to me, Schmitt seems to be making what is unclear, clear.

In the same style as Musique sur l’eau, but 20 years later: Charles Griffes’ Three Poems of Fiona MacLeod date from 1918.

JoAnn Falletta: I don’t consider myself to be an expert on French art songs, but I will say that the music the Schmitt piece reminds me of most is Three Poems of Fiona MacLeod by Charles Griffes — an American composer who was highly influenced by French musical style.  Both are lush — and quite different from Ravel’s Shéhérazade, for instance, which although it is exquisitely beautiful, seems more aloof by comparison.

A vintage copy of the score to Florent Schmitt’s Musique sur l’eau (original 1898 version for voice and piano), inscribed by conductor JoAnn Falletta and mezzo-soprano Susan Platts.

PLN: What was it like to come to this music for the very first time?  How did you develop your conception of the music?

Susan Platts: When JoAnn approached me about this project, she sent me the music first, along with a link to the Schmitt memorial concert performance that’s been uploaded to YouTube.  For me, I need to listen to music first to determine if I feel a connection to it — especially if it’s going to be a recording I’m making as well.  I like to feel that I’m going to find an emotional connection.

Florent Schmitt, photographed in 1900 around the time he composed the original voice/piano version of Musique sur l’eau.

At first, I had no idea who this composer was. Considering his last name, part of me thought, “Austrian?  German perhaps?”  I do a lot of German music, so that seemed OK — but then I discovered that he was French.  So now I was a little confused, but certainly intrigued!

And then when I listened to the music, both of the Schmitt pieces spoke to me and I could feel myself doing them.

Generally when coming to a new piece of music, I like to delve into different recordings to get a sense of how others may be interpreting the work.   With the Salomé this was possible, but not with Musique sur l’eau.  So that meant the main focus was on reading the poetry and learning the notes — trying it out on the piano — for it to begin to come together.

The French language can pose special challenges of articulation, plus some tricky vowel sounds which we must get just right while maintaining a smooth flow. This was another challenge to be met — and a little more of a hurdle for me than the German language is typically.

During our rehearsals, the BPO’s cover conductor mentioned that I could be doing more to articulate the words throughout Musique sur l’eau.  With the French language, you don’t want to interrupt the flow, but you want to be understood, too.  So I found that I needed to be just a bit more “percussive.”  Finding that perfect balance wasn’t easy.

Mezzo-soprano Susan Platts and conductor JoAnn Falletta listen to playbacks at the recording session for Florent Schmitt’s Musique sur l’eau (with producer and Tonmeister Tim Handley, March 4, 2019).

When I compared my score to what Régine Crespin sang on the 1958 memorial concert broadcast, I discovered that there are several places where her entrances are either late or early — by a couple of beats even. (My French horn-playing husband, Neil Kimel, confirmed this.)  It was a reminder that I needed to pay very close attention to the score, where there can be some deceivingly tricky rhythmic passages — something my Scottish-born vocal coach Alan Darling cautioned me as well when he worked with me on the piece.

In Crespin’s case, were they mistakes or was it simply taking artistic license? We’ll never know, but my goal was to be respectful to the score as it was written.

JoAnn Falletta: I did read the Samain poetry first — even before I saw the orchestral parts.  I think the poem informs the music.  There’s actually very little tinkering you need to do with the music.  The words themselves tell you when to push and when to relax.  Organically, it’s perfect.

The Saturday morning dress rehearsal by the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra prior to the evening’s concert (March 2, 2019).

Now that we’ve had the chance to play the piece in rehearsal, I can say that the music is so much better than I expected it to be. To hear it in “space,” it is simply amazing.  I hope our listeners will feel the same way.

It’s about the most perfect five minutes of vocal music that you can imagine.

Susan Platts: I found it wonderful to hear my voice with the orchestra — and there’s so much more in the score compared to I was able to hear in the broadcast recording.  To experience it here in Buffalo with all of the instrumentation plainly audible has been quite special.

In our first run-through we didn’t have to stop even one time — nothing got hiccupped. It was really quite good — which was also very gratifying!  Until you step onto the stage and do that first rehearsal, you never really know how it’s going to go — even if there are 100 recordings of the music out there to listen to beforehand.

PLN: Your recording will be the first one ever made of Musique sur l’eau — and indeed of any of Schmitt’s works for solo voice and orchestra. How does it feel to be a trailblazer in this repertoire?

Conductor JoAnn Falletta at the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra’s recording sessions for Florent Schmitt’s La Tragédie de Salomé and Musique sur l’eau (March 4, 2019).

JoAnn Falletta: I’m so delighted that this little gem is going to be on our recording.  There are numerous other recordings available of Salomé, but this will be the very first one of Musique sur l’eau.  I’m hoping that it will inspire people to look at other vocal pieces by Schmitt — and he wrote so many of them that he orchestrated as well.  The fact that he did so is clearly a sign of how significant he considered this part of his output to be.

PLN: Susan, does Musique sur l’eau make you curious to explore other art songs by Florent Schmitt?

Susan Platts: Absolutely!  I see that very few people have done so, although I notice that Philippe Jaroussky has recorded one early chanson.  There’s more than enough material to create an entire CD of these works, many of which I’m sure are very fine pieces.  As JoAnn mentions, most of them have been orchestrated by the composer, too.

PLN: Turning to La Tragédie de Salomé, this is Schmitt’s most famous orchestral piece. Your new recording will join numerous others made by such luminaries as Charles Munch, Paul Paray, Jean Martinon and Yan-Pascal Tortelier — all French conductors.  As a non-French interpreter, what special qualities do you bring to this music?

JoAnn Falletta: I really don’t think that this piece — or French music in general — needs to be confined to a French interpreter.  Of course it helps to be steeped in the culture, and a knowledge of the language is helpful, too.  But speaking as someone who loves French music and who has programmed much of it over the years, I’m just delighted to be in that world.  It isn’t a foreign language to me.

Aspects of Schmitt’s musical language are certainly unique to him — but it’s not foreign. There are moments in Schmitt’s music when you can hear a flavor of other composers like Debussy or Richard Strauss, but Schmitt isn’t copying them.  It’s never derivative; it’s simply the world he was part of in that time.

A vintage copy of Florent Schmitt’s piano reduction score to his ballet La Tragédie de Salomé, inscribed by conductor JoAnn Falletta.

PLN: Tell us about the decision to include the vocal parts in Salomé, as most recordings use an oboe shown in the score as an alternative option to the voice. Do you feel that the vocals add an extra dimension to the music?

JoAnn Falletta: I can see why some conductors would want to use the oboe.  It’s already a kind of oriental instrument, and it’s certainly convenient enough if the oboist wants to do it.

Moreover, the score isn’t that clear as to how many female voices to use.  You get the feeling that each conductor has to come up with his or her own solution.  So in addition to the possible logistical or budgetary challenges of bringing vocalists into an orchestral performance, there’s also the issue of what kind of voices to include.

For the Buffalo Philharmonic recording session, the voices in Florent Schmitt’s La Tragédie de Salomé were recorded midway back in Kleinhans Music Hall, facing the stage (March 4, 2019).

We’re using 15 voices, which is similar to the number Tortelier has on his Chandos recording with the São Paulo Orchestra. On the other hand, Ronald Zollman used an entire chorus in his recent UNAM [Mexico City] televised performance that’s been uploaded to YouTube.

We’ve been experimenting with how many voices to bring in at different places in the score — although in general terms we begin with Susan alone and then add progressively more singers.

I think it boils down to wanting to do what the composer preferred, which was to include the voices. It makes the recording more “authentic” in that way.

Susan Platts: To my mind, having the voice instead of the oboe makes it a more personal experience.  Not that an instrument like the oboe can’t transmit that kind of a mood, but a voice is a voice — it’s transmitting the story in the first-person.  The oboe may be fine at telling the story, but the voice is the story in this case.

In addition, I’m finding that having young supporting voices is working very well in creating the right atmosphere. I like that I’m offstage for the first part of the solo — as a kind of disembodied sound.  And then adding progressively more voices works really well.

PLN: As you’ve mentioned, all of the BPO musicians are performing both scores for the very first time.  What has been the atmosphere during rehearsals?

JoAnn Falletta: The atmospherics have been very good.  People have come to the rehearsals well-prepared.  I guess they noticed the important solos they have that are challenging and that they’ve obviously worked out well in advance.  Many of our musicians appear to be really getting into the music.  It helps when they’ve been given so many wonderful solo passages to play, of course.

Musicians of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra listen to playbacks during the recording session for Florent Schmitt’s ballet La Tragédie de Salomé (March 4, 2019).

Interestingly, I’ve noticed how some of the musicians have changed their approach as we’ve worked through our rehearsals. That fluidity is welcome to see.

And then the fast sections of the piece are very exciting in their own right.  The rhythmic delineation is also important — such as in the 5/4 measures with the triplet to the quadruple — and it’s been important to get that clarity for the most maximum impact.

PLN: What other pieces by Florent Schmitt are going to be included in the 2020 NAXOS recording, and when do you anticipate it being released?

JoAnn Falletta: Next spring we are planning to perform and record Schmitt’s ballet Oriane and the Prince of Love, written in the 1930s, along with an earlier work, Musiques de plein air — that one a world premiere recording — which will round out the disk.  We’re hoping that NAXOS will release the recording in 2020, helping to mark Florent Schmitt’s 150th birthday anniversary.

As for the programming strategy for developing the recording, since we were going to be doing Schmitt’s most famous piece we thought it would be worthwhile to include lesser-known works alongside it. Salomé may be the draw for buying the recording because more people will know that piece, but then they’ll make some wonderful discoveries with these other pieces, too.

Also, the four works take us from 1898 to the mid-1930’s, so we’re able to experience a progression of Schmitt’s development as a composer — how his style evolved over time. Those are two important aspects of his artistry — his great longevity and his unceasing activity throughout his career.  What we come to realize is that all along, Schmitt kept writing and evolving.

The March 2019 Buffalo Philharmonic concert program, inscribed by conductor JoAnn Falletta.

PLN: In closing, are there any additional points you would like to make about Florent Schmitt or the pieces included in this weekend’s concerts and recording?

JoAnn Falletta: The main point is that Schmitt’s music is endlessly interesting — and often tremendously exciting.  It’s evocative; it’s haunting.  Think about the first part of Salomé on the terrace of King Herod’s palace:  The music is beautiful, yet tinged with a kind of evil foreboding.  There’s something dark about it — yet irresistible as well.

For Susan and me, discovering Florent Schmitt’s music has been a very rewarding experience — and there’s still much more to explore!

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Having observed the Buffalo Philharmonic recording session following the weekend’s concerts, I can report with confidence that the music on the new Florent Schmitt CD will be every bit as significant and important as the 2015 NAXOS release. And to have it released during Schmitt’s 150th birthday anniversary year will be icing on the cake.

The international Bachtrack website is in the process of uploading its global database of classical music programs for the coming season.

Although it doesn’t provide a comprehensive listing of every professional group’s events, the site covers nearly all of the major orchestras, opera and ballet companies around the world, making it the “go-to” resource for information about what’s happening on the classical music calendar.  (Having one of the most robust and easy-to-use search mechanisms of any website of its kind is an added plus.)

The 2019/20 season is just now coming into focus – and we see that six important compositions of French composer Florent Schmitt will be presented by orchestras in Antwerp, Buffalo, Hiroshima, Montréal, Perth and Québec City, conducted by Kazuyoshi Akiyama, Lionel Bringuier, JoAnn Falletta, Fabien Gabel, Jaime Martin and Dirk Meyer.

The 150th birthday anniversary of Florent Schmitt, who lived from 1870 to 1958, happens in 2020. (Photo: Lipnitzki/Roger-Viollet, 1937)

The upcoming concert season is particularly significant in that the year 2020 is the 150th birthday anniversary year for Florent Schmitt, thus providing an opportunity for additional focus on this composer and his artistic legacy. Already we’re seeing the inclusion of orchestral pieces that aren’t the usual concert fare, and hopefully additional performance plans will come to light in the same vein.

Listed below are details on the upcoming season’s concerts, along with links to learn more information about the performances and to reserve tickets.

July 12, 2019

Schmitt: La Tragédie de Salomé, Op. 50 (1907/10)

Fauré: Pelléas et Mélisande Suite, Op. 80

Ravel: Tzigane

Saint-Saëns: Introduction & Rondo Capriccioso

Hiroshima Symphony Orchestra; Kazuyoshi Akiyama, conductor

Arabella Steinbacher, violinist

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October 3-5, 2019

Schmitt: Rêves, Op. 65  (1915)

Berlioz:  Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14

Ledger: Viola Concerto

West Australian Symphony Orchestra; Fabien Gabel, conductor

Brett Dean, viola

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November 8, 2019

Schmitt: La Tragédie de Salomé, Op. 50 (1907/10)

Holst:  The Planets 

Wagner: Das Rheingold: Entrance of the Gods into Valhalla

Augusta Symphony; Dirk Meyer, conductor

Women of the Augusta Choral Society

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February 22, 2020

Schmitt: Antoine et Cléopâtre, Suite No. 2, Op. 69b (1920)

Poulenc: Concerto in D Minor for Two Pianos & Orchestra

Ravel: Ma Mère l’oye: Suite

Ravel: La Valse

Antwerp Symphony Orchestra; Jaime Martin, conductor

Lucas & Arthur Jussen, duo-pianists

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March 6-7, 2020

Schmitt: Musiques de plein air, Op. 44 (1904)

Schmitt: Oriane et le Prince d’Amour: Suite, Op. 83b (1933)

Debussy: Prélude a l’après-midi d’un faune

Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 18

Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra; JoAnn Falletta, conductor

Konrad Skolarski, piano

(Schmitt selections being recorded for release on the NAXOS label)

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March 14-15, 2020

Schmitt: La Tragédie de Salomé, Op. 50 (1907/10)

Ravel: Valses nobles et sentimentales

Salonen: Helix

Shostakovich: Violin Concerto No. 1 in A Minor, Op. 77

Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal; Lionel Bringuier, conductor

Leonidas Kavakos, violinist

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May 27, 2020

Schmitt: Musique sur l’eau, Op. 33  (1898/1913)

Aubert: Habanera

Debussy: Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire: Le jet d’eau

Duparc: Three Songs (Chanson triste; Phidylé; Testament)

Poulenc: La Dame de Monte-Carlo

Ravel: L’Enfant et les sortilèges

Orchestre Symphonique de Québec; Fabien Gabel, conductor

Helene Guilmette, Marie-Éve Munger, Chantal Parent, sopranos

Antoinette Dennefeld, Geneviève Levesque, Stéphanie Pothier, mezzo-sopranos

François Piolino, tenor

Jean-Francois Lapointe, baritone

Robert Huard, bass

Le Chœur de l’Orchestre Symphonique de Québec

La Maîtrise des petits-chanteurs de Québec

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More information on these upcoming concerts can be found on the Bachtrack site, or on the web pages of the various arts organizations (click or tap on the links above).

In the coming weeks, it is likely that additional concerts featuring Florent Schmitt’s music will be announced for the upcoming season. They will be added to the listing above as soon as the information becomes available.