Robin György Cziffra Inferno. Orchestre National de Lille, Alexandre Bloch

Alexandre Bloch juxtaposes two French composers on this disc. First of all, Maurice Ravel, with the Rapsodie espagnole, his first major work for orchestra alone, written at the age of thirty-two, and La Valse, premiered thirteen years later and which he himself described as a ‘fantastical and fatal whirlwind’. And then Benjamin Attahir, born in Toulouse in 1989, one of the most gifted and prominent composers of the new generation. Commissioned by the Orchestre National de Lille and recorded here for the first time, it is a concerto for serpent that showcases the splendid sound of this low wind instrument, a member of the brass family even though it is made of wood covered in leather. ‘Adh Dhohr is part of a cycle I wanted to write focusing on the Salah, the daily rhythm of Muslim devotion’, says Benjamin Attahir. ‘This piece refers to the noon prayer, when the sun is at its zenith . . . The musical form is constructed around this “zenithal” moment and unfolds concentrically around it. (…) I wanted – as in oriental music – to return to the strictest monophony, which is a rather unusual project in concertante music. Soloist and orchestra share a single voice between them.’

Exiled in the United States since October 1940, Bela Bartok was short of money and worn out by leukaemia. Nevertheless, a few weeks' respite from the disease in August 1943 enabled him to fulfil a commission from the conductor Serge Koussevitzky. For a fee of a thousand dollars, he quickly wrote the Concerto for Orchestra, which was to be premiered at Boston's Symphony Hall on 1 December 1944. Koussevitzky was very enthusiastic about the Concerto, even describing it as 'the best orchestra piece of the last 25 years'. It was the success of this score that prompted the violist William Primrose to ask the Hungarian composer to write a work for him. Bartok had little experience of the instrument and was only convinced when he heard the soloist perform the Walton Concerto on the radio. The score was initially planned in four movements, but the composer's death reduced it to three. Amihai Grosz (a founder member of the Jerusalem Quartet, now principal viola of the Berliner Philharmoniker) joins the Orchestre National de Lille and Alexandre Bloch for this recording.

Alexandre Bloch, who has been Music Director of the Orchestre National de Lille since 2016, has chosen to devote a whole season of concerts to Mahler's symphonies. The Seventh (1904-05) is the most rarely recorded of the cycle unjustly, because this work later nicknamed Song of the Night testifies as clearly as its companions to the metaphysical grandiloquence that haunted Mahler during its gestation. From the gloomy Adagio of the first movement to the thundering Rondo that concludes the work, Alexandre Bloch and his orchestra lead us from the anguish of twilight to the ecstasies of dawn.

Ernest Chausson is a most unusual figure in French music, positioned at the crossroads where the romanticism of Berlioz and Franck meet the language of Wagner and the symbolism of the young Debussy. His Poème de l’amour et de la mer is a unique score for the period and certainly his greatest work; simultaneously a profane, naturistic cantata, a monologue, and a song cycle, it was composed between 1882 and 1892 to poetry by Maurice Bouchor, a longstanding friend of Chausson. Véronique Gens is recording this cycle for the first time, although she has already issued ‘Le temps des lilas’ with Susan Manoff at the piano for her album Néère, about which Ernst Van Bek wrote in Classiquenews: ‘Chausson’s “Le temps des lilas” mesmerises with the nuancing of its colors, the allusive precision of every sung word: this ecstatic, depressive prayer represents another peak of French post-Wagnerianism. The song uninterruptedly expresses the profound, accursed languor of overcharged spirits.