Roussel: Évocations, Pour une Fête de Printemps & Suite in F

Album review

Albert Roussel is one of the composers that we are very much supposed to love and worship... but very few orchestras, in France or abroad, regularly play his music, and if, here or there, one hears a fleeting Festin de l’araignée [Spider's Feast] or a bit of Bacchus, or, even more rarely, a symphony, the rest of his output seems relegated to a deeper obscurity. So hats off to this new recording from the musicians of the BBC Philharmonic conducted – luckily for national pride – by a Frenchman (but one whose career was made in England…) Yan-Pascal Tortelier; which brings together three pieces which are very rarely played, i.e. the sumptuous and feisty Suite of 1926 – a work of his later maturity, a contemporary of the explosive Third Symphony – or indeed the no-less sumptuous, colourful Évocations of 1911: a kind of exotic lab test for Padmâvatî which would follow a few years later (?), the Évocations, pure feelgood music, evoke a fabulous India across their three movements. What's more, if you can call a twelve-minute piece a movement, Pour une fête de printemps from 1921 bears witness to how, at one time, Roussel explored the depths of dissonance in a world that was still tonal. © SM/Qobuz