Franck, C: Psyché

After Karajan’s two-year, fly-by-night tenure at the helm of the Orchestre de Paris, the orchestra was looking for a music director of potentially equal standing but greater commitment. Step forward Daniel Barenboim, who had already made waves over the other side of the Atlantic with his concerts and recordings at the helm of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, succeeding in the process in fashioning interpretations of tremendous sweep, richness and splendour and harnessing the legendary sound of the orchestra, and especially its brass section, towards more malleable, less driven goals than the orchestra’s long-standing music director, Sir Georg Solti.

Among Barenboim’s most notable recordings in Chicago were of symphonies by Schumann, Bruckner and Saint-Saëns: composers of great relevance when considering the heady, Franco-German aesthetic of the Belgian composer-organist César Franck. Franck was, of course, first and foremost a Wagner epigone, who translated the German master’s heady chromaticism into clouds of musical incense. The Symphony is a three movement work of continuous development and long threads of melody. Psyché is a multi-movement tonepoem telling an erotic story of Classical legend. The complete version includes obligatory wordless female chorus (think Ravel’s Daphnis and Piernés Cydalise et le Chèvre-pied, as well as Debussy’s Nocturnes). This version, as is commonly done, shaves off the choral movements.

Psyché was the last and most ambitious of Franck’s symphonic poems. Unlike the programmatic aspect of a tone poem, Sibelius’ symphony No. 2 is a vivid musical portrait of Finland which invokes a sense of national pride told through the music.

The music is performed by the Gürzenich-Orchester Köln and conducted by Yuri Ahronovitch. The fact the recording is a live performance lends a decided "sense of occasion" to the rendition, a factor that certainly makes it worth hearing.

Jan Latham-Koenig is one of the most exciting and engaging conductors working in Europe today. As Music Director of l’Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg he built it into one of Europe’s most prestigious and active orchestras, giving over 100 concert performances and, with Opéra du Rhin, numerous operas each season. They scored a major success with their critically acclaimed DVD release of Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites, which received the Diapason d’Or de l’Année, and a rosette in the new Penguin Guide to Compact Discs. Strasbourg has grown increasingly important as a European centre of culture and business, as the quality of their orchestra attests, and they have cultivated a captive musical audience. There are no other pairings of these two key Franck works currently available.

In the past century, Jean Fournet (1913–2008), a “gentle perfectionist”, as some of the critics characterised him, was one of the leading champions of French music throughout the world. In addition to heading globally renowned orchestras (director of the Opera-Comique in Paris, chief conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, the Rotterdam Philharmonic and the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra), he also left a distinctive footprint in Prague, with the Czech Philharmonic in particular. He first appeared there as a guest at the Prague Spring festival in 1954, then in January 1961, and for the last time, at the age of 90 (!), in 2003. At the time of the Iron Curtain, Fournet represented for the Czech Philharmonic a rare and precious opportunity to enter the world of French music with the most competent guide there was.

During his visits to Prague between 1963 and 1967, he and the orchestra made the enchanting and highly acclaimed recordings presented on this CD: in their “Ančerl” period, the Czech Philharmonic naturally embraced Fournet’s refinement, sense of form and purity of colours. The precious recordings, newly remastered, are being released on a Supraphon CD for the very first time. Enchanting French flamboyance a la Jean Fournet.

In 2008 Challenge Classics released a very popular, limited edition of The Original Recordings 1950-1960 of the legendary Dutch conductor Willem van Otterloo with The Hague Philharmonic. This eagerly anticipated new seven-CD set presents a broader perspective, and features four renowned orchestras with which he conducted and recorded, including the Royal Concertgebouw, the Vienna Symphony, the Berlin Philharmonic, and the Hague Philharmonic.

Willem Van Otterloo (1907-1978) was born in Winterswijk, Gelderland, in the Netherlands. While playing as a cellist in the Utrecht Stedelijk Orkest, he won a composition prize from the Concertgebouw Orchestra for his Suite No. 3, which he presented in his 1932 conducting debut. He held posts with the Utrecht Stedelijk Orkest, before being appointed chief conductor of the Residentie Orkest in The Hague (1949-1973).

Challenge Classics have also issued a disc of Van Otterloo’s compositions, performed by the Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra (CC72180).

This 8-disc set is released in commemoration of the 10 year anniversary of Ahronovitch’s death.