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I’ve been listening almost exclusively to French music this week, so my playlist may be a little one-sided. While French classical music is often unpopular in England, there are, as I am discovering, some incredible works in the repertoire. Here’s a selection of four late nineteenth and twentieth-century French instrumental works, all well worth listening to.
Edouard Lalo’s Cello Concerto was composed in 1877 in collaboration with the Belgian cellist Adolphe Fischer, who premiered the work in Paris in December of the same year. The concerto is well known in the cello repertoire, but sadly, is one of only a few of Lalo’s works to be performed regularly. Exuding Romantic passion, the concerto boasts a dramatic first movement, a Spanish tinged second, and a highly virtuosic third.
Maurice Ravel String Quartet in F major was completed in April 1903, his final submission to the Prix de Rome and the Paris Conservatoire. While the work was rejected by both institutions, it acted as a catapult in Ravel’s career, as music critics rallied to his cause. With a touch of the exotic, combined with a huge range of changing tone colours, it is no surprise that the Quartet is today considered Ravel’s first masterpiece.
Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time was premiered on 15 January 1941 in Görlitz, a German prisoner of war camp. While interned as a POW, Messiaen discovered among his fellow prisoners a clarinetist, cellist and violinist. This combination, with the addition of piano, played by the composer, led to the unusual scoring of the work. While the title of the work does refer to the Book of Revelation, it also reflects Messiaen’s revolutionary treatment of time in the music – movements such as ‘Abîme des oiseaux’ (Abyss of Birds) contrast a feeling of suspended animation created by very slow music with melodic virtuosity. Describing this movement, Messiaen commented: ‘The abyss is Time with its sadness, its weariness. The birds are the opposite to Time; they are our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant songs.’
Gérard Grisey’s Partiels is an orchestrated deconstruction of a trombone’s low E. Grisey (who studied under Messiaen) uses instruments playing microtonal intervals to duplicate the harmonic overtones of the note, which he then re-arranges into a piece. This creates an ethereal and otherworldly soundscape, but one far more accessible than the contemporary serialism of Pierre Boulez. This technique is broadly known as ‘Spectralism’, a movement popular in France in the 1970s and 80s. Other notable composers include Horatio Rădulescu and Tristan Murail.
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