Category: Daily Dispatch

Vive les orchestrateurs de musique classique français!

This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” for Bastille Day, enjoy original works by figures who employed their skills as orchestrators in the service of more celebrated French composers.

Henri Rabaud (1873-1949) was, variously, conductor at the Paris Opéra Comique, director of the Paris Opera, and director of the Paris Conservatory. For a season, he ever led the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Though he wrote several operas and two symphonies, as well as choral, chamber and instrumental music, Rabaud’s own original output is very seldom heard. However, his orchestration of Gabriel Fauré’s charming “Dolly Suite,” originally for piano four-hands, endures. We’ll hear Rabaud’s symphonic poem “La Procession nocturne,” inspired by Nicolas Lenau’s “Faust.”

André Caplet (1878-1925) directed the Boston Opera from 1910 to 1914. He was gassed while serving in the First World War, which resulted in the pleurisy that plagued him for the remainder of his short life. Caplet died at the age of 44. His harp quintet, “Conte fantastique,” after Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” is occasionally heard. But his tenuous grip on fame is really through his association with another composer, Claude Debussy, for whom he orchestrated “Children’s Corner,” “Clair de lune,” “Le Martyrdom de saint Sébastien” and “La boîte à joujoux.” Tonight we’ll have the opportunity to enjoy Caplet’s lovely Septet for Voices and String Quartet.

Henri Büsser (1872-1973) acted as secretary to Charles Gounod. He also became a protégé and friend of Jules Massenet. At Debussy’s request, Büsser conducted the fourth performance of “Pélleas and Mélisande” and numerous performances thereafter. He died in Paris less than three weeks shy of his 102nd birthday! Büsser’s own output includes much music for the stage, including 14 operas, a ballet, and incidental music. Yet his name is kept alive principally as the orchestrator of Debussy’s “Petite Suite” and “Printemps.” He’ll be represented tonight by “Andalucia,” an original work for flute, on Spanish themes.

Charles Koechlin (1867-1950) had many enthusiasms: medieval music, Bach, travel, stereoscopic photography, communism, pantheism, sports. He was especially interested in early film stars (he wrote works in tribute to Ginger Rogers, Douglas Fairbanks, Charles Chaplin, and Lillian Harvey) and the “Jungle Books” of Rudyard Kipling. Despite enjoying an astonishingly prolific career as a composer himself, Koechlin is associated in most people’s minds with his orchestration of Fauré’s “Pélleas and Mélisande.” He also worked as an orchestrator on Debussy’s “Khamma.”

Koechlin’s series of orchestral works, inspired by Kipling, span most of his creative life. These were composed in a broad array of styles, encompassing impressionism, neo-classicism, polytonality, and even quasi-serialism. We’ll hear the last of his Kipling cycle, “Les Bandar-Log,” ostensibly about a barrel of chattering monkeys, but the term has also come to be used to describe anyone who irresponsibly prattles.

I hope you’ll join me in liberating these overlooked composers from the Bastille of neglect on “French Connections,” this Sunday night at 10:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.