Suite en fa Sinfonietta Symphonie numéro 3 Deux Poèmes Sérénade Opus 30

Description

Albert Roussel (1869-1937) was twenty-five years old in 1894 when he gave up a well-defined career as a naval officer (having sailed to Cochinchina and India) to begin serious musical studies: he settled in Paris, took lessons from Eugène Gigout, and then became a student of Vincent d'Indy at the Schola Cantorum. The mastery of counterpoint he acquired there (which he later taught) in no way stifled his personal and colorful inspiration. A jewel of his orchestral work, the Suite in F (1926) is emblematic of a vigorous writing style: Paul Paray elevates the angular lines of the Prelude like no one else (and what brass!), restores the festive sounds to the Gigue, and balances flexibility and fervor in the Sarabande. Like the Deux poèmes de Ronsard (1924), where Roussel intertwines a soprano and a voluble flute, the Sérénade (1925) for flute, harp, violin, viola, and cello soars into more ethereal spheres: arachnid ostinatos serve as a setting for an Andante that is nothing but a quiver and a caress under the fingers of the Melos Ensemble of London. The Trois pièces op. 49 (1933), capping Roussel's piano output, do they not reach out to the group of Six? A toccata followed by a playful polytonal waltz (Yvonne Lefébure delights in the incessant changes of rhythm and nuance) leads to a scherzo where a brief sigh is immediately swept away. It is to Jane Evrard and her Orchestre féminin de Paris that the composer dedicates a Sinfonietta for strings that is as… virile as can be: the painful crescendo of its Andante flows into a whirlwind of energy, for which Georges Tzipine makes the bows of the Société des concerts du Conservatoire crackle. Roussel himself placed his Symphony No. 3 at the pinnacle of his work, the premiere of which opened the festivities for the fiftieth anniversary of the Boston Symphony in 1930 (preceding Prokofiev's Symphony No. 4, Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, Respighi's Metamorphoses…). For the richness of its colors, the firmness of its lines, and the beauty of the sound recording, we have chosen another American ensemble, the New York Philharmonic. Who better than the elusive Leonard Bernstein could convey "the sudden alternations of joy, meditation, dream, and anxious brilliance that characterize Roussel's art" (Fred Goldbeck)? (François Laurent)