Fanfare Magazine music critic Steven Kruger shares his reaction to the first U.S. staging of the Psaume since 2019.

A poster announcing the Houston Symphony’s 2025-26 season-opening weekend of concerts.

For the Houston Symphony’s 2025-26 season-opening weekend of concerts, music director Juraj Valčuha elected to include Florent Schmitt’s monumental Psaume XLVII, Op. 38, in which the orchestra was joined by the Houston Symphony Chorus, the Houston Chamber Choir and American soprano Angel Blue.

A sonic “experience”: Psalm 47 by Florent Schmitt.

Considering that the weekend’s three concerts were the first time that Schmitt’s Psalm had been presented in the United States since 2019, it was an event that attracted music-lovers from far afield.

I was one of a group of like-minded individuals who traveled to Houston from five states to attend the performances, which were very well-received by an audience made up of people who, by and large, were not familiar with the music beforehand.

In addition, the Saturday, September 20^th concert was livestreamed, providing an opportunity for music-lovers anywhere in the world to access a video broadcast of Psaume XLVII for only the second time ever (the first one being Fabien Gabel’s June 2022 Orchestre National de France performance at Maison de la Radio in Paris, broadcast by France Musique).

Steven Kruger

Music critic Steven Kruger was one of the Schmitt afficionados who traveled to Houston to see the Psaume. Kruger is a popular longtime music critic at Fanfare magazine who for many years also reviewed concerts featuring leading American orchestras for the New York Arts e-zine. Moreover, Kruger is a retired arts agent who once managed the activities of a roster of internationally known conductors while with Shaw Concerts in New York City during the 1970s.

Post-concert socializing at the Lancaster Hotel. Houston Symphony principal cellist Brinton Smith is at left; music critic Steven Kruger at right.

Mr. Kruger and I attended the Saturday evening concert together – a program that also included a Stravinsky ballet suite plus the world premiere presentation of a composition by the American composer Julia Wolfe. Following the concert, several of us socialized with Houston Symphony principal cellist Brinton Smith at the Lancaster Hotel across the street from Jones Hall, capping off a memorable evening of music and camaraderie.

The 2025-26 season’s first weekend programming for the Houston Symphony. One of the featured works was Florent Schmitt’s Psaume XLVII.

Knowing Mr. Kruger’s reputation for writing intelligently and insightfully about music and musicians, at the conclusion of our visit I invited him to share his observations about the Houston concert.  His review is presented below:

Houston Symphony Pulls Out All the Stops in Season-Opening Concerts

By: Steven Kruger

Juraj Valčuha

Houston Symphony patrons witnessed an impressive 2025-26 season opening at Jones Hall on Saturday, September 20th, led by Juraj Valčuha. Such concerts are celebratory by their very nature, and this program’s first half featured two festive works: Julia Wolfe’s Liberty Bell, and, far more importantly and lastingly, I think, Florent Schmitt’s Psalm XLVII, in its first North American performances since 2019. 

Wolfe’s piece was commissioned by four orchestras (Houston, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Nashville) to celebrate the United States’ founding, and judging by its brassy, rhythmic, and percussive assault on the senses, it surely conveyed a requisite sense of struggle. If the Liberty Bell were not already cracked, this piece would have cracked it. It was tonal and relentlessly energetic, pausing only occasionally with deep panting grunts, before clanging on. The strings were used percussively, not melodically, and one wondered whether they were really needed at all. 

Given the wake-up quality of this music (two young women sitting in front of me started be-bopping like bobbleheads), I was wondering if Schmitt’s massive Psalm XLVII, composed in 1904, would still have pride of place for impact on the audience. I need not have worried. The piece is scored for an eight-part mixed chorus, soprano solo in the central section, organ (in this case only electronic), and a voluminous orchestra. It begins with competing brass fanfares that batter you in the solar plexus with a blast of power as deep as an orchestra can deliver. It then proceeds to ricochet along with joyous rhythmic choral yawps, punctuated by syncopated percussion. I was happy to notice that the bobbleheads soon began to bobble anew.  

More seriously, one notes that this nominally religious work contains not one iota of gloom or guilt, does not threaten you with the wrath of God and sees no reason to supply Brahmsian consolation, instead barreling along with sensuality, praise, and sheer exuberant triumph. 

Angel Blue (Photo: © Dario Acosta)

A much slower and lengthier melodic central section features a soprano voice voluptuously singing the Bible’s only love song, the Song of Songs. Angel Blue, wearing blue in her Houston Symphony debut, soared richly into the ethereal blue, or what the French symbolists would have called l’azur. It was so effective, you felt like scooping someone into your arms and hugging them. 

This last statement is a more significant point to make than it might seem at first: Unlike many religious musical works, Psalm XLVII radiates a very human sense of affection. Despite its power, it does not set out to intimidate. And it was influential. Frederic Delius’ A Mass of Life, written in 1907, would feature a cheerful women’s chorus tripping along singing “la-la-la.” Twenty-seven years later, William Walton would take a cue from Schmitt to compose Belshazzar’s Feast, a piece so happily theatrical in feeling that cathedrals resisted performing it at first. 

The music of Florent Schmitt has seen a considerable revival in recent years. He was present for the full flowering of turn-of-the-century French music, and in hindsight his impact can be seen and felt almost everywhere. (There is a passage for two harps in Psalm XLVII, for instance, that prefigures a similar moment in Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé.) So I was doubly pleased that Valčuha chose to feature the piece at the opening of the Houston Symphony’s new season.  

Juraj Valčuha brought Psaume XLVII to Houston in September 2025. This concert program was inscribed by the Maestro.

Igor Stravinsky (l.), photographed with Florent Schmitt at the time Stravinsky was composing his Firebird ballet in Paris (ca. 1909) …

… and together a half-century later at a social function at the American Embassy in Paris (1957).

Jones Hall leans towards acoustic dryness, but the excellent chorus was able to achieve luminous subtlety nonetheless, in perfect balance with the orchestra, which gleamed throughout. The quiet choral moments were especially moving, while the final section of the Psalm was particularly exciting. Valčuha is a remarkably supple and accomplished conductor, and he marshalled his forces as effectively as I have ever heard in this work. 

Although I experienced the Schmitt as the most important piece on the program, Valčuha concluded the evening with Stravinsky’s 1945 revision of his Firebird Suite. This slightly lighter-textured version of the 1919 suite that concertgoers usually hear was nominally revised to make it easier to perform more widely, but the cynic in me believes that Stravinsky wanted to preserve more of his sylph-like and dithery ballet music that might otherwise be forgotten. It takes up much of the first half of the 1945 version. Valčuha’s heart was clearly in it, and his performance amounted to a graceful and appropriate ending to this stunning Houston Symphony season-opener.