Home listening - Chausson, Ben-Haim and Bushra El-Turk

The Guardian 0

New releases from the Orchestra National de Lille and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales

• The Paris milieu of Ernest Chausson (1855-99) was a crowded affair, with walk-on parts for fellow composers Franck, Fauré and Debussy, writers Mallarmé and Turgenev, and painters Monet and Degas. Chausson himself remains relatively overshadowed. He died young (in a bicycle accident) and never quite established the reputation a longer life might have allowed. Yet the late romantic world he inhabits, coloured by the influence of Wagner, Massenet, Franck, is distinct and individual.

The Orchestra National de Lille and conductor Alexandre Bloch (Alpha Classics) have paired Chausson’s Symphonie Op 20 (1891) with his Poème de l’amour et de la mer (1893), part cantata, part song cycle, rapturously sung by Véronique Gens. Maurice Bouchor’s symbolist texts about the sea, and the death of love, have a verbal richness that Chausson captures in a sensuous, throbbing score. The composer’s only symphony, in B flat, opens in bright, soaring mood, with a yearning slow movement and an “animé” finale that pulls all the work’s ideas together. Perhaps it doesn’t quite cut it as a masterpiece, but the Lille players and Bloch make a fluent, idiomatic case. The presence of Gens in the gorgeous Poème is the real draw here.