For a composer who wrote many pages of chamber and instrumental music featuring nearly every instrument of the orchestra, Florent Schmitt’s compositions featuring the flute are comparative few. This may seem surprising for a musician who actually played the flute in several military musical ensembles during World War I. Nevertheless, I count only three such […]
Tag Archives: French Composers
We know that Florent Schmitt’s penultimate work was the Symphony No. 2, composed in 1957 and premiered in 1958 by Charles Munch and the French National Radio Orchestra a few months before the composer’s death at age 87. The question is, which composition stands as Schmitt’s first essay in the genre? Because in fact, the […]
One of the final works created by the French composer Florent Schmitt was a quartet he titled Pour presque tous les temps. It is one of the last numbered compositions in Schmitt’s entire output (#134 out of a total of 138 opus numbers) and was completed in 1955, three years before the composer’s death. Schmitt was known […]
One of the most interesting works by Florent Schmitt is his Lied et Scherzo, Op. 54, which he composed in 1910. The genesis of the music was a request from Gabriel Fauré for Schmitt to write a horn competition piece for the Paris Conservatoire. The original manifestation of the Lied et scherzo was as a […]
Composed between 1898 and 1911, Florent Schmitt’s Crépuscules, Op. 56 is a set of four pieces for solo piano that was published in 1913. It’s one of the most compelling French piano works of the period. It also looks forward to Ombres which came along just a few years later — and which is probably the composer’s ultimate […]
“[Florent Schmitt’s four-hand piano works are] probably the finest in the whole modern repertoire. Sanely modern and splendidly constructed (they are a joy to play), his large output — in quality and inspiration — stands alone, and his genius finds full expression in this form.” — Alec Rowley, English composer and keyboard artist One of […]
Timpani, the French CD label that specializes in recording unfamiliar French repertoire of the romantic and modern eras, has just announced plans to release the first-ever recording of Florent Schmitt’s children’s ballet, Le petit elfe Ferme-l’oeil, Opus 73. The Ferme-l’oeil score is quite interesting in that it began life in 1912 as a suite of […]
Without question, La Tragédie de Salomé, Op. 50 is Florent Schmitt’s most famous composition. Composed in 1907 and revised in 1910, this ballet is far more often performed as a symphonic suite these days (although the Mariinsky Ballet revived the stage version in 2013). The composition became famous from the very start – recognized by […]
Florent Schmitt’s Légende, Op. 66 is one of the most compelling concertante pieces ever written for the saxophone. Composed in 1918, it’s a work that exists in versions for saxophone, viola and violin soloist, along with orchestral or piano accompaniment. Simply put, it’s an unforgettable piece of music: Within the span of just ten minutes, Schmitt presents a rhapsodic […]
One of the most memorable aspects of French composer Florent Schmitt’s musical output is his artistic work in the “orientalist” realm. In fact, in this aspect it could be claimed with some justification that Schmitt had no peer, notwithstanding the efforts of other fine composers in France (Saint-Saens, Bizet, Lalo, d’Indy, Roussel, Rabaud, Ravel, Delage, Aubert, etc.) and elsewhere […]
The French pianist Bruno Belthoise has been performing Florent Schmitt’s piano duet composition Une semaine du petit elfe Ferme-l’oeil, Op. 58 since 2006. Not only has he become a champion of the music score, he has also created a special presentation incorporating Schmitt’s music, story line narration and imagery that helps introduce children to the world of […]
Maurice Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit is justly recognized as that composer’s most towering achievement in piano keyboard writing. Composed in 1908, this set of three pieces (Ondine, Le Gibet, Scarbo) which take their inspiration from a book by Aloysius Bertrand, are the most technically demanding and revolutionary of Ravel’s piano works. Far less well-known but equally […]
Dionysiaques, Op. 62 is unquestionably Florent Schmitt’s most famous work for wind ensemble. It was composed exactly 100 years ago, but it would take decades for this 11-minute tour de force to become part of the core repertoire of concert bands. First in France … then in Europe and the United States and now in the […]
The popularity of large-scale works like Psalm XLVII, La Tragédie de Salomé and Dionysiaques would make one think that Florent Schmitt cared little for intimate subject matters as inspiration for his compositions. But the reality is different. While it’s true that the more grandiose and dramatic scores of the composer tend to be the ones […]
As the complete music for piano duet and duo composed by Florent Schmitt continues to be released by the Grand Piano label in its series featuring the Invencia Piano Duo, it’s becoming clear that this is music of immediate appeal … and also of substance. Three of the four planned CDs in the series have now been released in […]