Recorded in March 2015 by the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, the pieces are slated for release on the NAXOS label later this year. Under its music director JoAnn Falletta, the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra has established something of a reputation for programming neglected scores from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including performances in recent years of works […]
Tag Archives: Ravel
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 […]
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 […]
In the early years of the 20th Century, several French composers would pen some highly interesting compositions that have given harp players some great repertoire items in the ensuing decades. The composers in question were Claude Debussy, André Caplet, Maurice Ravel … and Florent Schmitt. And the instigation was the arrival of the chromatic harp on […]
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 works in the Schmitt […]
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 […]
Throughout classical music history, “omnibus” compositions have been rather rare – and for the most part, they’ve been forgotten shortly after their celebrated premieres. Perhaps the earliest one of these interesting concoctions that has at least remained on the fringes of the repertoire is Hexameron — a morceau de concert put together in the late […]
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 […]
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 […]
The chamber music pieces of Florent Schmitt are quite interesting and varied. Among them are wonderfully intimate works such as the Sonatine en Trio from 1934 which have a flavor somewhat similar to the chamber works of Schmitt’s compatriots Debussy and Ravel. But there are numerous other Schmitt compositions for chamber players that inhabit a different sound-world – more full-bodied and containing surprising […]
One of the most exciting recent recording projects featuring the music of Florent Schmitt is the complete duo-piano music being released in 2012-13 by Naxos Grand Piano. The four-CD traversal is performed by the Invencia Piano Duo: Andrey Kasparov and Oksana Lutsyshyn. The first of the four volumes in the series was released in late […]
“… An extravagant outburst of highly perfumed Franco-exoticism at its most virile, heroic and exalted … I can’t think of another piece that achieves — or even attempts — quite the impact made by this work.” — Walter Simmons, author and music critic, Fanfare Magazine “Regarding the Psaume, what can we say that hasn’t already […]
For music-lovers who know Florent Schmitt’s big orchestral works, it might be surprising to learn that the composer also wrote many pieces for solo instruments and chamber ensembles. There is a vast trove of music for solo and duo-piano, and some of these are the beneficiary of fine recordings made recently by pianists like Vincent Larderet, […]