Chausson's "Poème": a gem of French Romanticism

Ernest Chausson (1855-1899), around 1895

Ginette Neveu, violin

David Oistrakh, violin

Zino Francescatti, violin

by Ken

Now that, I dare say, is one gorgeous tune, and a tune gorgeously suited to the solo violin. (One feature worth noting in the tune's formal notation: The accented beats the ear hears hardly ever occur on the downbeats where one would expect them. What seems like such a simple, straightforward flowing melody actually isn't so simple or straightforward.)

As I mentioned last week, when we listened to Ravel's "funny music," the concert rhapsody for violin and orchestra Tzigane, it was actually its frequent disc-mate, Ernest Chausson's Poème for Violin and Orchestra, that actually got me thinking about the pieces, which were both included, with Zino Francescatti as soloist, on a CD in Sony's Leonard Bernstein Edition, filling out Lenny's 1961 New York Philharmonic recording of Berlioz's Harold in Italy (with William Lincer, the orchestra's principal violist from 1942 to 1972, as soloist).


SO THIS WEEK: CHAUSSON'S POÈME

Sunday Classics snapshots: "Papa" Monteux, "Petrushka," and fiddlers four

Monteux conducted Saint-Saëns (!) in the Schumann Concerto
[from the 80th-birthday interview with Edward Kelly included in the set]


How Monteux came to conduct the premiere of Stravinsky's
Petrushka (and later, of course, The Rite of Spring)


Monteux conducts the opening of Petrushka

As we know, he conducted the ballet's premiere with Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in 1911. This excerpt is from the recording he made with the Boston Symphony Orchestra for RCA, Jan. 25-28, 1959.

by Ken

If we had an actual snapshot to accompany today's musical ones, it would be of me arriving at my desk to find a package of a size that didn't immediately suggest anything I'd ordered. This is the plus side of dissipating memory: the occasional surprise "gift." (In fairness of a sort to me, the two things I could recall having ordered both had special circumstances -- meaning complications -- attached.)

I had to rip the package open to find, as you've probably guessed by now, the Sony set of Pierre Monteux: The Complete RCA Album Collection, which is to say all the recordings he made for RCA. (There's a fellow online who refuses to grasp, no matter how many times it's explained to him, that this is not the same thing as "all the recordings of his that were issued on RCA" (and thus it excludes those made during the label's affiliations with EMI and then Decca, which after all don't belong to it), and keeps insisting that he was somehow cheated. I have suggestions of what he might do, but I'll be good and keep them to myself.

I ordered this set, even though I already had a lot of the material on CD -- there's the rest that I didn't have, and some that I did that I hoped might sound better. And more than anything, this is Monteux, and longtime readers will have some idea how much that means to me. This is a musician with as deeply resonant and finely tuned musical sensibilities as any conductor I'm familiar with.

When I came to musical consciousness, Monteux (1875-1964) was still very much among us, and still -- into his 80s -- amazingly active. So perhaps it's understandable that for me he is permanently "Papa" Monteux. The new set reminds me, however, that his air of seniority goes back a ways. When he made his first RCA recordings, in San Francisco in April 1941 (weirdly, by telephone line to RCA's recording studio in Los Angeles), he was already 66! And though Sony bills the first 10 of these 39 music CDs, devoted to the pre-LP recordings (there's also a "bonus" CD with a 29-minute 80th-birthday interview), "The Early Recordings," these are of course only Monteux's early RCA recordings; he had been recording in Europe for decades.


SO WHAT SHALL WE LISTEN TO?