Orchestral music by Florent Schmitt to be featured in 2026-27 concert season programs presented in Bochum, Bordeaux, Buffalo, Liège, Minneapolis, Pau, St. Petersburg-Clearwater and San José.

Florent Schmitt’s La Tragédie de Salomé (from sketch artwork, 1912).

For afficionados of Florent Schmitt’s music, the upcoming 2026-27 season of orchestral concerts will include Schmitt compositions that are both familiar and rare. In addition to one of Schmitt’s acknowledged “biggest hits” La Tragédie de Salomé, the featured repertoire includes several works that don’t show up on concert programs very often — Antoine et Cléopâtre and Le Palais hanté — as well as two true rarities, the early-career Feuillets de voyage. and the Stèle pour le tombeau de Paul Dukas, Schmitt’s tribute to his friend and fellow-composer who passed away in 1935.

Lionel Bringuier

Schmitt’s well-known La Tragédie de Salomé (1907/10) will be played this season by orchestras in Germany, Belgium and the United States. French conductor Lionel Bringuier directs the piece with two orchestras — the Orchestre Philharmonique Royal de Liège in Belgium and the Minnesota Orchestra in the United States. The April 2027 concerts in Minneapolis will be the first time this work has been performed by the Minnesota Orchestra/Miinneapolis Symphony in nearly nine decades — ever since the days of Dimitri Mitropolous in the 1930s.

For Maestro Bringuier, this season’s performances of Schmitt’s Salomé reflect his deep affection for the music — a score he has presented in concert more than a dozen times, going all the way back to 2009 in London, Stockholm, Helsinki, Maastricht and Los Angeles when the conductor was not yet 23 years old.

Sylvain Cambreling: Nearly a half-century of advocacy for Florent Schmitt’s Tragedy of Salome.

The Salomé score will also be presented in Germany this season, with Sylvain Cambreling leading the Bochum Symphony Orchestra in two June 2027 performances. Maestro Cambreling is another longtime champion of this piece, having presented it all over the world since 1980.

In January, JoAnn Falletta will lead the Florida Orchestra (Tampa-St. Petersburg) in performances of the first suite from Schmitt’s incidental music to Antoine et Cléopâtre (1920). This suite is a musical “calling card” of Maestra Falletta; not only has she presented it as music director with two of her orchestras (the Virginia Symphony and Buffalo Philharmonic), she also made the first American recording of both Antony & Cleopatra suites with the latter ensemble in 2015.

JoAnn Falletta, pictured with her Antoine et Cléopâtre conductor scores.

The suites have become much better known in recent years, and for this a significant measure of credit goes to Falletta and her 2015 BPO recording. Its release on the NAXOS label gave the music much wider dissemination compared to the two French recordings that preceded it — both of which had limited international availability and distribution.

JoAnn Falletta will also be presenting Schmitt’s Stèle pour le tombeau de Paul Dukas in an April 2027 concert with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. This is a piece that has never been performed publicly since its December 1938 premiere given by the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra under the direction of Charles Munch. Originally published as a piano work in a 1936 issue of the French periodical La Revue musicale, the Stèle was Schmitt’s memorial tribute to a composer who had been both a musical colleague and a friend over many decades (the two composers were born just five years apart).

The 1938 orchestral version of the work has never been published, but the composer’s manuscript score was among Charles Munch’s personal papers that eventually landed at the Fleisher Collection in Philadelphia. In 2025, French conductor Yan Pascal Tortelier recorded Stèle pour le tombeau de Paul Dukas with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. That recording will be released on the Chandos label in October 2025, but the April 2027 Buffalo performance will be the first time music-lovers will been able to experience this gem of a composition live in concert in nearly 90 years.

Jason Klein

As for the Schmitt rarity being resurrected this season, in January 2027 Jason Klein will lead the Saratoga Symphony (San José, California) in a performance of Florent Schmitt’s Feuillets de voyage. This suite features the composer’s own orchestration of five numbers from his two eponymous sets of piano duets composed between 1903 and 1905. Building on the effectiveness and charm of the original piano duets, Schmitt’s colorful orchestrations provide a brilliant sheen to these captivating pieces.

To my knowledge, the Saratoga Symphony’s performance of Feuillets de voyage will be the first time this music has been performed in concert anywhere in the world in over 30 years. Moreover, it appears to be the first time the score has been presented in the United States in more than a century — ever since the Chicago Symphony Orchestra played the music under the direction of Frederick Stock back in 1922!

For Maestro Klein, his presentation of Feuillets de voyage comes on the heels of directing another early-career Schmitt rarity — Reflets d’Allemagne — with the Saratoga Symphony last season; that concert performance was the first one for that score in many decades as well.

Pierre Dumoussaud

As the fourth Schmitt orchestral work to be scheduled this season, the Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine, led by Pierre Dumoussaud, will play the 1904 tone poem Le Palais hanté in concerts presented in Bordeaux and Pau in February 2027. This Poe-inspired score shows up on concert programs from time to time — in recent years at the Buffalo Philharmonic (JoAnn Falletta, 2015), The Cleveland Orchestra (Fabien Gabel, 2017), Orchestre National de France (Cristian Măcelaru, 2021) and Fresno State Symphony Orchestra (Thomas Loewenheim, 2022).

The February ONPA concerts tie in with recording sessions done recently by the orchestra that focused on French tone poems from the turn of the previous century. The forthcoming recording, titled Fantastique!, is scheduled to be released later in 2027 on the Alpha label.