For music-lovers who know Florent Schmitt’s big orchestral works, it might be surprising to learn that the composer also wrote many pieces for solo instruments and chamber ensembles. There is a vast trove of music for solo and duo-piano, and some of these are the beneficiary of fine recordings made recently by pianists like Vincent Larderet, […]
Monthly Archives: October 2012
There are a number of indisputably great composers for the film: names like Richard Addinsell, David Raksin, Dimitri Tiomkin and John Williams. And there are “serious” 20th century composes who also devoted more than a little of their effort and energy to writing for the screen. Erich Wolfgang Korngold comes immediately to mind, although one could also […]
All his life, Florent Schmitt was an inveterate traveler … but we think of his globetrotting primarily in connection with Europe, the Mediterranean Region, the Middle East, South Asia and Brazil, rather than North America. And in fact, the composer was to travel to the United States only one time his life – in 1932 […]
Dr. Jerry E. Rife, a musicologist and professor of music at Rider University, has been a specialist on the music of Florent Schmitt for over 30 years. He has published several articles on the composer, and has just completed a detailed entry on Schmitt for the upcoming edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians. The early […]
“The music is vigorous, colorful, and imbued with a slightly fierce sadness which is perhaps the most personal characteristic of the author … a feeling that, rightly or wrongly, we take to be oriental and even Semitic.” — Music critic Louis Laloy, writing about the 1920 premiere of Florent Schmitt’s Antoine et Cléopâtre. When one […]