In this recital, Véronique Gens and Hervé Niquet bring back to life a neglected aspect of France’s Romantic heritage: songs with orchestral accompaniment. Aside from a few pieces by Debussy and Duparc, and Berlioz’s famous Nuits d’été, orchestral mélodies form a virtually forgotten continent. In collaboration with the specialists of the Palazzetto Bru Zane, Alpha now revisits these musical landscapes, taking us from Brittany (Hahn) to Persia, whose beauties Fauré and Saint-Saëns exalt in very different ways. Mélodies by Chausson, Gounod and Dubois and rarely heard instrumental pieces by Massenet, Fauré and Fernand de La Tombelle round out the journey with their musical reveries.

The dance permeated every layer of Romantic society. From popular dance halls to courtly salons, people showed their public face, enjoyed themselves and met one another in waltz time or to the rhythms of the quadrille or the polka. At the same time, ballet gained unprecedented fame on the stage of the Paris Opéra. The music that accompanied this frantic round in France has long been neglected, whereas the Viennese have never ceased to celebrate their waltzes. Under the expert baton of François-Xavier Roth, the orchestra Les Siècles has set out to rediscover this French repertory using historical instruments. Their album explores the output of both established composers – Camille Saint-Saëns, Ambroise Thomas, Charles Gounod, Jules Massenet – and their colleagues who specialized in Terpsichorean entertainment, including Philippe Musard, Isaac Strauss, Émile Waldteufel and Hervé.

REVIEWS:

Beautifully recorded and with Bru Zane’s customary excellent booklet notes, this is a disc to delight Francophiles, especially sweet-toothed ones like myself.

 -- Gramophone

There is a blowsy joie de vivre in these performances by Roth’s French Orchestra Les Siecles that is hard to resist.

-- The Sunday Times (UK)

It’s all very French, and presented with great flair and warmth by Roth and his orchestra.

-- The Guardian (UK)

The Polyphonia Ensemble Berlin, which was founded by musicians from the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, presents French chamber music from around 1900 on this recording. The featured composers – Théodore Dubois, Vincent d’Indy and André Caplet – may have been overshadowed by their better-known contemporaries, but they nevertheless played major and original roles in the development of music in France, bequeathing us an appreciable quantity of remarkable works. At the same time, they represent three generations in the development of music at the dawn of the 20th century.

REVIEW:

The concert is thoroughly professional and artistically convincing. Timbres are resonant; and the balance, blend, and teamwork are terrific. The slow movements are warm and lyrical; and the fast movements are vigorous and sparkling. Each of the scores here deserves more frequent performances; and the Polyphonia Ensemble Berlin gives a masterclass in how to play them. Every serious chamber music collector should have this album.

-- American Record Guide

Of the three works on this disc, the one by perhaps the least well-known composer, Caplet, turns out to be the most virtuosic for the wind instruments, the most colorful, and the most enjoyable. … Caplet was a master orchestral scorer. And it sounds to me like his Suite persane demands the most in technical skill from the Polyphonia Ensemble Berlin’s ensemble of 10 wind players. The performance is really quite outstanding. The vivid and vibrant playing from this all-wind band is executed with absolute accuracy of pitch and such clarity of detail that all the rhythmic complexity and brilliance of Caplet’s scoring take on a three-dimensional quality.

-- Fanfare

Overall, this is a very enjoyable recording. None of the individual movements is longer than nine minutes, so there is never a sense of them overstaying their welcome...[nor] of the aimless burbling that I used to associate with the few wind ensemble works I had heard in the past. The playing of the wind section of Polyphonia Ensemble Berlin seems, to my inexperienced ears, to be very good. In the Dubois, there were a few moments when the violins were a little harsher than the music seemed to require. The recording blends the instruments naturally, and there are no extraneous noises from the players or the instruments.

-- MusicWeb International

The music of Théodore Dubois (1837–1924) has rather been overshadowed by that of other French composers of the same period, not least Fauré and Saint-Saëns. But Dubois does not deserve his relative neglect: not only was he a superlative craftsman, but he could also unfold a fetching melody and had a strong sense of musical narrative. This recital of chamber works for oboe and strings is noteworthy for a further quality, one often underestimated: much of the music is, quite simply, charming.

Born in the Champagne countryside in 1837, Théodore Dubois developed his talents at the Reims Cathedral, which explains why the Catholic sacred sphere influenced him throughout his life. Even today he continues to be known in France above all as a composing organist and a composer of sacred music for liturgical use who compiled a massive oeuvre. He also continues to be much discussed in educational circles as the author of the standard manuals in music theory of a strictly conservative nature. We are now releasing three of his violin compositions, which, by contrast, have been neglected and wrongly forgotten by posterity. His Violin Concerto was dedicated to none other than the violin legend Eugène Ysaÿe. The quality of this work is manifested most impressively in the Adagio middle movement in the form a long-drawn-out melody with a mighty amplitude; the deepest depths are fathomed with big sound, and iridescent heights are scaled. Here the whole individual value of French violin culture is revealed. And his only Sonata for Violin and Piano also contains the name of a great virtuoso in its dedication – Henri Marteau – and was composed to order for him.