Franck Symphony in d

César Franck - Symphony in D minor & Ernest Chausson Symphony in B-flat, Op.20
Orchestre de la Suisse Romande - Marek Janowski
SACD ISO (2.0/MCH): 3,38 GB | 24B/88,2kHz Stereo FLAC: 1,09 GB | Full Artwork | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: Pentatone # PTC 5186 078| Country/Year: Netherlands 2006
Genre: Classical | Style: Romantic

…While the better-known Franck symphony receives top billing on this album, Ernest Chausson's Symphony in B flat is a shining example of a student surpassing his teacher. Chausson's handling of the orchestra seems much more deft and natural. While elements of Franck's teaching are quite clear, so too are the influences of Wagner and Debussy. The sweeping melodies and lush accompaniments are again handled with the utmost attention to detail by Janowski and the OSR.

César Franck - Symphony in D minor & Ernest Chausson Symphony in B-flat, Op.20
Orchestre de la Suisse Romande - Marek Janowski
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 282 MB | Full Artwork | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: Pentatone # PTC 5186 078 | Country/Year: Netherlands 2006
Genre: Classical | Style: Romantic

…While the better-known Franck symphony receives top billing on this album, Ernest Chausson's Symphony in B flat is a shining example of a student surpassing his teacher. Chausson's handling of the orchestra seems much more deft and natural. While elements of Franck's teaching are quite clear, so too are the influences of Wagner and Debussy. The sweeping melodies and lush accompaniments are again handled with the utmost attention to detail by Janowski and the OSR.

This recording marks the beginning of the collaboration between the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra and its new music director, the French conductor Alain Altinoglu, who conducts the leading European and American orchestras and has made a reputation for himself in every repertory – not forgetting opera at Salzburg, Bayreuth, and La Monnaie in Brussels, where he is music director. Their first disc pays tribute to a composer whose bicentenary is celebrated in 2022, César Franck, with the famous Symphony in D minor and two less well-known works, presented in new editions: the symphonic poem Le Chasseur maudit (1882) and the large-scale symphonic interlude from the oratorio Rédemption, composed in 1872 after the Paris Commune, performed here in its first version, long considered lost.

The most brilliant of Belgian composer César Franck's compositions were written during the final decade of his life; the Symphonic Variations for piano and orchestra, the famous Violin Sonata, the D major String Quartet, and, perhaps most important, the Symphony in D minor are all the products of a single, remarkable five-year period. The Symphony, by no means an immediate success with critics or audiences, has nevertheless become so fused with the popular image of César Franck that it is nearly impossible to think of him without also thinking of this 40-minute orchestral juggernaut.

It is very interesting, but also quite a shock, to play the contents of this disc in the wrong order. What a born Franckian Ashkenazy is, one thinks, listening to his account of Les Djinns and admiring both the boldness of outline and colour in the orchestral sections and the long-breathed nobility of phrasing that he brings to the piano theme that calms the music's turbulence. And the impression is redoubled by his voluptuous reading of Psyche (of its four orchestral movements, that is; the choral ones are as usual omitted, though Decca puzzlingly print Franck's synopsis of them in the accompanying booklet). What a fine control of sustained, arching line and of slowly built crescendo and, in the fourth movement, what a shrewd understanding of how much sensuality underlays Franck's image of pater seraphicus!

This recording marks the beginning of the collaboration between the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra and its new music director, the French conductor Alain Altinoglu, who conducts the leading European and American orchestras and has made a reputation for himself in every repertory – not forgetting opera at Salzburg, Bayreuth, and La Monnaie in Brussels, where he is music director. Their first disc pays tribute to a composer whose bicentenary is celebrated in 2022, César Franck, with the famous Symphony in D minor and two less well-known works, presented in new editions: the symphonic poem Le Chasseur maudit (1882) and the large-scale symphonic interlude from the oratorio Rédemption, composed in 1872 after the Paris Commune, performed here in its first version, long considered lost.

This recording marks the beginning of the collaboration between the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra and its new music director, the French conductor Alain Altinoglu, who conducts the leading European and American orchestras and has made a reputation for himself in every repertory – not forgetting opera at Salzburg, Bayreuth, and La Monnaie in Brussels, where he is music director. Their first disc pays tribute to a composer whose bicentenary is celebrated in 2022, César Franck, with the famous Symphony in D minor and two less well-known works, presented in new editions: the symphonic poem Le Chasseur maudit (1882) and the large-scale symphonic interlude from the oratorio Rédemption, composed in 1872 after the Paris Commune, performed here in its first version, long considered lost.