Organist and music researcher Guillaume Le Dréau talks about French composer Florent Schmitt’s consequential work as a Parisian music critic (1912-1939).

Guillaume Le Dréau is one of the most multi-faceted musicians I know. A keyboard artist, he is currently the organist at Rennes Cathedral in France — but this position represents only one aspect of his many musical activities.  Not only does he play the organ and piano, he is a composer, an arranger, a teacher and a researcher. […]

French conductor Jean-Luc Tingaud, soprano Ewa Biegas and choral director Teresa Majka-Pacanek talk about the 2016 Polish premiere performances of Florent Schmitt’s choral masterpiece Psalm 47 (1904).

Florent Schmitt’s powerful choral work Psalm XLVII may have been composed in 1904, but it took more than a century for the piece to receive its premiere performances in Poland, in February 2016. That’s when French conductor Jean-Luc Tingaud and the Krakow Philharmonic Orchestra joined forces with the Krakow Philharmonic Choir, directed by Teresa Majka-Pacanek and soprano […]

Florent Schmitt and Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Friendship Over Five Decades

The cover story in the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society Journal, published in October 2014, focuses on the half-century friendship between the French composer Florent Schmitt and his English counterpart. The two composers were near contemporaries of one another — Schmitt was older by two years — and they died within mere days of each other in […]

French Soprano Denise Duval: Muse to Francis Poulenc … Friend of Florent Schmitt

A living legend today — well into her nineties — the French soprano Denise Duval is a link to France’s glorious musical past. History remembers her as the famous muse to Francis Poulenc, but Duval was also an important interpreter of the music of other significant French composers of the early- and mid-twentieth century — among […]

The Composer and the Impresario: Florent Schmitt and Felix Aprahamian

Felix Aprahamian (1914-2005) is probably the closest thing to a renaissance man we’ve seen in the 20th Century — at least in the realm of music. Born into an Armenian immigrant mercantile family in London in 1914, he spent his entire life in the service of music, despite having trained for a career in business. […]