One of the most satisfying of Florent Schmitt’s extensive trove of music for piano duet and duo – and the one that is my personal favorite of all of them – is Trois Rapsodies, Op. 53, a work he composed in 1903-4.

Made up of three movements titled Française, Polonaise and Viennoise, it is a work that fully engages the senses on first hearing.

That’s not unexpected, considering the “immediate appeal” that music of this kind has on listeners; the rhapsodies of Liszt, Dvořák, Enesco, Ravel and Gershwin are also good cases in point.

What is perhaps more surprising is how interesting and inventive these rhapsodies continue to sound on subsequent hearings. As it turns out, this isn’t superficial music at all. Instead, it is meaty material that continues to pay rich dividends every time it’s heard. I’ve known this music for more than 40 years, and it never grows old or “routine.”

As the CD booklet notes for one of the Rapsodies recordings puts it:

“The music is saturated with rich harmonies and textures, offering nearly every possible kind of ‘poly’ element – polyphonic, polyrhythmic, poly-thematic – in a rainbow of colors coated with grace and elegance.”

The Canadian pianist Leslie de’Ath contends that Florent Schmitt’s “mastery of the unexpected” is unsurpassed in this particular composition, writing:

“Schmitt’s cornucopia of delicious musical tricks seems always to be just one step ahead of the listener, while at the same time inviting us to savor each unexpected moment.”

The musicologist and librettist Charles Burr described the pieces as “sophisticated national rhapsodies.” He is correct: each of the movements possesses distinct “national” characteristics – yet they are also thoroughly cosmopolitan.

The French novelist and music critic Benoît Duteurtre senses the inspiration of three composers in the music: Chabrier in Française; Chopin in Polonaise; and Johann Strauss Jr. in Viennoise.  Perhaps — but I wouldn’t consider Schmitt to be aping these other composers in any sort of fashion.

More broadly, the Armenian-American pianist Andrey Kasparov discerns other aspects as well, describing the movements that make up the Trois rapsodies like this:

“[They] are conceived in the grand Romantic style, with the composer taking full advantage of the multilayered textural and coloristic possibilities of two pianos. Despite the intense contrapuntal writing and, at times, complex harmonic language, the work never loses its Gallic charm, lyricism and humor.”

These rhapsodies proved to be quite popular with French pianists including the team of Ginette Doyen and Hélène Pignari, as well as Mme. Doyen teaming up with André Collard (performances by both teams were broadcast over French Radio in the 1950s).

More recently, the music has been broadcast by pianists Nathalie Radisse and Jeanne Wolferstaeter (in the 1970s), plus Nadine Desouches and Janine Sassier (in the 1980s).

In the United States, two of the three rhapsodies (Polonaise and Viennoise) were presented in Boston as early as 1919 by the piano duo team of Alfred de Veto and  William Mason. And in 1932, Florent Schmitt himself presented Trois rapsodies during his only American tour. In San Francisco he was joined by pianist Gunnar Johansen as the opening number of an all-Schmitt concert that also included the composer performing several solo piano pieces, the first movement from his Sonate libre (joined by violinist Jascha Veissl) and his monumental Piano Quintet.

Moving ahead some decades, one of the first to perform the complete Trois rapsodies in concert was the duo-pianist team of Frank Cooper and Martin Marks. Their October 1967 live performance of the music at Butler University’s Clowes Memorial Hall has been uploaded to YouTube and can be heard here.

Fortunately for us, the music is well-represented on disk these days — although it took decades before the first recording would appear. That premiere recording was made by Columbia Records in 1956 with Robert and Gaby Casadesus – and it would remain the only commercially recorded documentation of this music for nearly 40 years thereafter.

The Casadesus’ full-bodied performance is viscerally very exciting, and I think it’s fair to say that no other recording since has conveyed quite the swagger that this team delivers.

The Casadesus recording is available to hear on YouTube. If you listen past the somewhat scratchy vinyl and the thin bass response (a defect in the transfer, not in the original Columbia recording which is satisfyingly full-bodied), you’ll discover just how effective the Casadesus interpretation is.

Even better, the recording has finally been reissued on CD mere months ago, after being out of the catalogue for decades.

In 1992, the first stereo recording of the Trois rapsodies appeared – another highly effective reading by pianists Huseyin Sermet and Kun Woo Paik. Released on the Valois label, this interpretation inhabits a sound-world redolent of the Casadesus performance — but perhaps with a bit more “icy brittleness.”

But you can compare for yourself, thanks to Philippe Louis who has uploaded the Valois performance on one of his worthy YouTube music channels. The same recording has also been uploaded along with the score, for those who wish to investigate the music in greater depth.

The three more recent recordings – two Canadian and one American – are more broadly expansive in their flavor. They are:

Kanazawa-Admony Piano Duo (Tami Kanazawa and Yuval Admony) – Roméo Records (recorded in 2001)

Invencia Piano Duo (Andrey Kasparov and Oksana Lutsyshyn) – NAXOS Grand Piano (recorded in 2010)

Leslie de’Ath and Anya Alexeyev – Dutton Epoch (recorded in 2011)

Having listened to all five of the commercial recordings of the Trois rapsodies, I can confirm that each one has its own merits. All of the performances are polished efforts; whichever interpretation one would consider “the best” is purely a matter of personal preference.

I have also been fortunate to see this music performed in recital — a terrifically exciting performance by the Invencia Piano Duo done in 2013. From this experience, I know first-hand that the rhapsodies can make quite an impact when heard live. It can be safely assumed that the audience at the recital I attended did not know this music at all before hearing it that evening … and yet the response was electric.

Interestingly, there is another two-pianist rhapsody by Florent Schmitt that exists – an unpublished work composed in 1900. Written in much the same vein as the Trois rapsodies, this other one is called Rhapsodie parisienne.

The score was discovered among the composer’s papers at the Bibliothèque National in Paris when Andrey Kasparov and Oksana Lutsyshyn (who make up the Invencia Piano Duo) were doing research as part of their project to record the entire works by Florent Schmitt for piano duet and duo. (Those four CDs were released by NAXOS Grand Piano in 2012 and 2013.)

Thanks to permission granted by Florent Schmitt’s granddaughter, the Rhapsodie Parisienne was able to be recorded.  It appears on the same Invencia Duo CD as the Trois rapsodies, and it proves itself to be every bit as colorful as the other three pieces. An exciting public performance of this rhapsody, played by the Invencia Piano Duo, is also available on YouTube.

Schmitt was known to consider the piano to be “a convenient but disappointing substitute for an orchestra” (to quote his own words). So it should come as little surprise that he orchestrated a number of his piano scores for performance in the concert hall. Examples of these works include Soirs, Feuillets de voyage, Mirages, Pupazzi and Reflets d’Allemagne.

Such was the case with the Trois rapsodies also. The first movement to be orchestrated was Rapsodie viennoise, done by Schmitt in 1911. It received its first performance by the Orchestre Lamoureux later that year under the direction of Camille Chevillard (and it was recorded by Albert Wolff with this same orchestra in 1931).

Meanwhile, the first North American performance happened in March 1912 in a Boston concert directed by Georges Longy. The following year, the piece was presented by the Philadelphia Orchestra under the direction of Leopold Stokowski (November 1913), and in 1919 and 1920 the New York Philharmonic led by its music director Josef Stránský presented the piece to audiences there.

Subsequently, Schmitt orchestrated the other two movements as well. The orchestrations were published by Durand, and the full set was premiered by Paul Paray and the Lamoureux Orchestra in 1928.

[According to a report from Andrey Kasparov, when studying the manuscript for the Rhapsodie parisienne he noticed instrument markings made by Schmitt on the score. This leads Kasparov to believe that the composer had intended to orchestrate this work as well.   Why he didn’t – and why the original two-piano version wasn’t published either – remain a mystery.]

Over the years, the Rapsodie viennoise has proved to be the one most often performed in its orchestral garb — being programmed by French conductors such as Jean Martinon and Serge Baudo in the 1950s and 1960s. In one Martinon performance with the Lamoureux Orchestra in 1954, the Le Monde music critic René Dumesnil remarked that the piece ended the concert “like a bouquet of fireworks.”

But unlike the relatively robust recorded history of the piano version of the Rapsodies, no complete recording of the orchestral version has ever been made. The 1931 Rapsodie viennoise recording is still available today, contained in a large 4-CD set released by Timpani Records that includes all of Albert Wolff’s recordings made with the Lamoureux Orchestra.

For those who do not wish to invest in a big set such as this, the 1931 Wolff performance has also been issued by Forgotten Records in a single-CD format, along with works by Vincent d’Indy and Albert Roussel.  That CD is available for purchase online and can be ordered here.

Unfortunately both the interpretation and the sound quality of the 1931 Rapsodie viennoise recording are disappointing; the orchestra sounds lumpy and sluggish, and the sound is thin and boxy. It is nice to have it for historical reference – but that’s about all.

An alternative to the Wolff/Lamoureux recording exists in the form of a 1964 concert performance done by Serge Baudo with the ORTF Orchestra and broadcast over French National Radio.  Although not much better in terms of sonics, it is a far more vivacious and engaging interpretation.  The Baudo performance has been uploaded to SoundCloud and can be heard here.

Despite their sonic shortcomings, listening to these orchestral performances makes it clear that this music is well-worthy of resurrection in the modern era. Having paged through the instrumental score, I can report that all of the trademark aspects of Schmitt’s compositional style are present – most particularly the beguiling and highly colorful orchestration in the grandest Rimsky-Korsakov tradition.

Of the three rhapsodies, Viennoise is the one that gets an occasional airing in concert these days.  It was performed by the late conductor Gianfranco Masini and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Montpellier in July 1991 — a performance which the newspaper Le Monde characterized as follows:

“[The piece] begins a bit in the Russian way — Mussorgsky genre — then follows with splendid Viennese waltzes à la Johann Strauss which also resonate with the polyphonic complexity of Richard Strauss, and ends with an astonishing prefiguration of Ravel’s La Valse … This virtuoso, opulent piece puts the musicians of an orchestra to the test — a test that the Monpellier players dispatched with their heads held high.”

Most recently, Jacques Lacombe and the Orchestre Symphonique de Mulhouse performed the Viennoise as part of their 2020 New Year’s Concert program. Moreover, several other conductors I know have considered programming Rapsodie viennoise, but that continues to leave the other two rhapsodies as the odd ones out. Here’s hoping that several of Schmitt’s more ardent advocates will redress this situation in the coming years – perhaps conductors Alain Altinoglu, JoAnn Falletta, Sascha Goetzel, Fabien Gabel, Jean-Luc Tingaud, Lionel Bringuier or Stéphane Denève will step up to the podium and make the premiere recording. Who’s game for it?

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Update (3/5/19):  The Casadesus duo’s premiere recording of Florent Schmitt’s Trois rapsodies has finally been released in CD format featuring a remastering from the 1956 session tapes.

It is part of a collector’s edition set of 65 CDs released by Sony that encompasses all of Robert Casadesus’ recordings for Columbia Masterworks, as well as his Columbia recordings of duo- and triple-pianist works with wife Gaby and son Jean.

The Sony set features original jacket artwork, including the LP release of the Schmitt material (see above) that also contains the piano four-hand suite Une Semaine du petit elfe Ferme-l’oeil.  The set is well-worth acquiring.