Chostakovitch Symphonie n° 15 Rojdestvenski

Albert Roussel (1869-1937) a vingt-cinq ans, en 1894, lorsqu’il renonce à une carrière toute tracée d’officier de marine (il a navigué jusqu’en Cochinchine et aux Indes) pour entamer de sérieuses études musicales : il s’installe à Paris, prend des leçons auprès d’Eugène Gigout, puis devient l’élève de Vincent d’Indy à la Schola Cantorum. La maîtrise du contrepoint qu’il y acquiert (puis enseigne) n’assèche en rien une inspiration aussi personnelle que colorée. Joyau de son oeuvre pour orchestre, la Suite en fa (1926) est emblématique d’une écriture vigoureuse : Paul Paray élance les lignes anguleuses du Prélude comme personne (et quels cuivres !), rend à la Gigue ses sonorités de kermesse, équilibre souplesse et ferveur dans la Sarabande.

Vous tentiez en vain de vous procurer la version qui couronnait dans notre numéro de septembre la discographie de la Symphonie n° 38 ? Elle est à vous, avec deux autre perles.

During his lifetime, Karl Böhm was a widely appreciated conductor of Bruckner with a thoroughly personal tone of his own to put up for discussion. The present recording of the Seventh Symphony with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra was made in 1977 and is therefore the latest made by Böhm of this work. One can see especially clearly how Böhm performs Bruckner in the Seventh Symphony, the work which opens the trio of “Adagio Symphonies” but deviates from strictly symphonic writing in its lyrically wandering character. He avoids all semblance of enraptured, otherworldly monumentality with cantabile, long-breathed phrasing, loving attention to sonic and melodic detail and with a well thought-out dramaturgy of tempi. Böhm’s Bruckner shines in luminous colours and is infused with the warmth of an ever-present singing quality. This is no high-priest’s celebration of cool, distant symphonic architecture, but a down-to-earth, accessible Bruckner interpretation.

« Paul and I initiated in Myths and the Concerto a new style, a new way of playing the violin. » Without Paul Kochanski, one of the greatest violinists of his time, Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937) would he have written for the instrument, daring these escapes in the high-pitched, these well-known sound effects but which he was the first to use for expressive purposes and integrates in a form as free as it is rigorous? His “impressionism” would then have been limited to the orchestra and the piano, depriving us of these “three poems” (1915) and of this Concerto (1916) which, breaking with traditional virtuosity, is no less a poem - "Symphonic work with solo violin, which has the effect of a concerto". Two incandescent works, Dionysiac or opalescent, of a heady sensuality, inspired by ancient myths and, undoubtedly, by The Night of May, pantheist poem of Tadeusz Micinski where "ignites the fire of love". As war sets Europe ablaze, reclusive in his native Ukrainian mansion, Szymanowski relives his Mediterranean dazzles and remembers all that Diaghilev's musicians revealed to him.

The classical decoder! Clément Lebrun is a born pedagogue: in just a few words, this inspired all-rounder makes the greatest works of classical music accessible… In this programme intended for all ears, he tells the story of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, movement by movement, with the enthusiastic participation of the Orchestre de Paris (conducted by Fabien Gabel), which is also heard performing the work in its entirety under the direction of Simone Young. Just listen to the Fourth and you too will love Brahms…

The popularity of the ''Polovtsian Dances'' would have eclipsed the rest of ''Prince Igor'', this vast historical fresco in which Alexander Borodin, absorbed by his works of chemist, worked from 1869? “We start a hundred different things. Will we be able to finish some of them? […] I harbor the hope of conducting my opera to its last bar, but […] I advance slowly and at long intervals. It was Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov who granted this wish, after the sudden death of his comrade from the Group of Five in 1887. To put in order and complete the score, he was helped by his disciple Alexander Glazunov. Thus the great posthumous work could be created in 1890 in Saint Petersburg.