The French author and playwright Jean de la Fontaine is best-known for his fables, which are considered masterpieces of French literature. The fables of the ancient Greek author Aesop may be better known across the world, but La Fontaine deserves an equivalent place in the spotlight considering that he produced no fewer than 240 of […]
Tag Archives: Nicolas Southon
For nearly every French composer coming of age during the period 1850-1950, competing for and winning the Prix de Rome first prize for composition was the indisputable gold standard. While the musical careers of some Prix de Rome recipients didn’t flourish as much as might be expected, no doubt the prestige of winning the honor […]
Not long ago, a document surfaced on the Internet that dates from the time of the Paris Exposition of 1937. As Europe’s last great transnational gathering before World War II swept the continent, countries great and small exhibited their art and culture at the International Exposition of Art and Technology in Modern Life (as it […]
Published in English and French versions, the book is available for viewing and download free of charge. Recently, the music publishing firm Durand-Salabert-Eschig (part of Universal Music Publishing Group) released a book titled A French Touch: Rediscovering a Uniquely French Symphonic Repertoire. Researched and written by French musicologist and author Nicolas Southon, the slender volume (44 pages long) […]
Cliquez ici pour écouter l’interview de Schmitt/Gavoty sur YouTube. For devotees of the Florent Schmitt Website + Blog, we are pleased to provide a link to a rare taped interview of the composer, done on February 20, 1957 when Schmitt was 86 years old. The interview was conducted at the Jeunesses Musicales de France by Bernard […]
In the last two decades of his long life and extensive musical career, the composer Florent Schmitt would devote much of his energies to creating instrumental music and pieces for voice and choir. Indeed, by and large Schmitt’s later-career output eschewed the full orchestra — with a number of notable exceptions, among them the Introït, récit et congé […]
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 1956, two years before the composer’s death. Schmitt was known […]
Here we have it, ladies and gentlemen: France’s missing symphony from the 1950s … It is almost impossibly beautiful, with some of the most kaleidoscopic sound-staging and effective bass sonorities you will encounter. Florent Schmitt’s Second Symphony was never precisely lost, to be sure. It’s actually the Francophone fifties which seemed to disappear and turn […]