Roussel - Évocations; Pour Une Fête de Printemps; Suite in F

The Guardian 80

Rudge / Fisher / Le Roux / CBSO Chorus / BBC Philharmonic / Tortelier
(Chandos)

When many of the musical byways of the first half of the 20th century are now explored so assiduously, it’s surprising that the music of Albert Roussel is heard less often than it was 30 years ago. Even his most celebrated orchestral works – the Third and Fourth Symphonies, the ballet scores The Spider’s Banquet and Bacchus and Ariadne – now rarely make it on to concert programmes outside his native France.

Born in 1869, Roussel was a late starter as a composer – he’d spent seven years as a midshipman before beginning his studies with Vincent d’Indy at the Schola Cantorum in Paris. His subsequent career fell into two distinct phases, with the first world war, when Roussel served as an ambulance driver, as the dividing line. If his early scores belong very much to the French tradition he’d inherited from D’Indy and expanded via the influence of Debussy, the later music has a more neoclassical feel, more Hindemith than Stravinsky perhaps, with lean, clear textures, crisp outlines and propulsiveness.

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