Salome

In 1907 Florent Schmitt composed music to accompany a ‘mimodrame’ danced by Loïe Fuller, La Tragédie de Salomé . His score is bursting with colour, energy and voluptuousness – and also with oriental influences stemming from his travels to Morocco and Constantinople, where he discovered the howling dervishes. The final scene features the heart-rending ‘Chant d’Aïça’, an oriental melody sung by a soprano. This music, though bold and modern for the listeners of 1907, nonetheless aroused the admiration of another composer, Igor Stravinsky, to whom Schmitt dedicated the Symphonic Suite he subsequently derived from the work. However, Alain Altinoglu, at the helm of the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra of which he has been Music Director since 2021, has chosen to record the original version of this landmark of early twentieth-century French music. The beautiful Chant élégiaque , in its 1911 version for cello and large orchestra, completes this programme.

Christoph von Dohnanyi is one of those conductors, like Wolfgang Sawallisch, Rafael Kubelik and Josef Keilberth, who were relatively ignored by the journalist school of music critics and later, usually after they are dead, lauded to the skies as undiscovered geniuses of the podium. Well, Maestro Dohnanyi is alive and well and with us and still conducting, mostly at the Zurich opera, and it is a good thing that his performances are being filmed, if not recorded, for posterity because he is a giant of the operatic podium, especially in the operas of Richard Strauss and Richard Wagner.

On 5 July 1950, shortly after the completion of the Salome score in Berlin and well before its first performance, Strauss wrote to inform his publisher Adolf Fürstner that he himself would undertake a French version of his new composition. His adaptation would retain the existing orchestration but alter the vocal line to accommodate Oscar Wilde's original French Salomé. Geneviève Lièvre, notes to the Virgin recording.