Schmitt: Symphony No. 2 & Suites from Antoine et Cléopâtre

Albumbeschreibung

Florent Schmitt made his name in his mid-thirties with such rich, resplendent scores as La Tragédie de Salomé and Psalm 47. Their brilliance, however, should not have overwhelmed so much the rest of his output, for he lived another half century, and, as his Second Symphony demonstrates, retained his creative energy to the end. The initial occasion for the two Suites from Antoine et Cléopâtre recorded on this album was one of the extravaganzas put on in Paris by Ida Rubinstein, a woman whose sheer cold beauty gained an extra lustre from the vast wealth she inherited, and who was ready to display both – the looks and the lucre – majestically in the theatre. Having arrived in the French capital with Diaghilev’s company, she soon went independent. In June 1920 she took over the Paris Opéra for five gala performances of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, with herself as Cleopatra opposite the flamboyant Édouard De Max in a new translation which she had commissioned from André Gide. The titles of the six movements that Schmitt extracted in his two suites generally tell us where to place them within the action. In December 1957, 37 years later, Schmitt completed his Second Symphony, his last major work, at the age of eighty-seven. As lavish as his earlier music and as rhythmically sophisticated, emphatically bounding in fast passages and supple in slow, the symphony has nothing valedictory about it. Happily, the composer was there in Strasbourg in June 1958 for the first performance, conducted by Charles Munch. He died two months later. This was Schmitt’s only symphony in the strict sense, and it is not clear why he called it “No.2”. Of the two possible candidates for the “No.1” spot – his Symphonie concertante for piano and orchestra of 1931 and Janiana, a symphony for strings a decade later – neither is altogether convincing. Maybe the numbering was just an old man’s whim. © SM/Qobuz