Charles Koechlin - The Seven Stars' Symphony (James Judd)

Information

Composer: Charles Koechlin

• The Seven Stars' Symphony, Op. 132
• Quatre Interludes, Op. 214 (orch. Otfrid Nies)
• L'Andalouse dans Barcelone, Op. 134

Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin

James Judd, conductor

Date: 1996

Label: RCA

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Review

It was in 1933 that Charles Koechlin saw his first film, The Blue Angel, starring Marlene Dietrich and Emil Jannings. The 65-year-old composer was at once totally bowled over by “the formidable realm of the cinema” and immediately embarked on his extraordinary Seven Stars’ Symphony. Completed within the space of a few weeks, each of its seven movements portrays (and bears a dedication to) an individual movie star of the day. The work is a curiosity, certainly, but what unexpected, weirdly beguiling and often haunting invention is encountered along the way!

Take the opening portrait of Douglas Fairbanks: no swashbuckling antics here, rather (in Koechlin’s own description) “a little oriental improvisation” of exquisite delicacy and exotic capriciousness. Elsewhere, a “pagan hymn” to Greta Garbo is entrusted to an ondes martinot: the effect is other-worldly, icy radiance allied to a ravishing luminosity. Clara Bow inspires a scherzo of flashing brilliance, Marlene Dietrich a tender meditation on a bewitching melody derived from the letters of her name (“What luck that the theme... should be as beautiful as she herself!”). The last movement is the most ambitious of all, however: a complex 15-minute character study of Charlie Chaplin which is by turns witty, affectionate, provocative and (ultimately) deeply compassionate; it represents one of Koechlin’s finest achievements.

And what of the couplings? Well, Otfrid Nies (the excellent annotator here and head of the Koechlin archive) supplied the expert orchestrations of the Quatre Interludes. When the Opera Comique of Paris commissioned a half-hour ballet from Koechlin in 1947, the result was to have been a work entitled Voyages. Not only did the score draw on five movements from the Seven Stars’ Symphony, but Koechlin also sketched out four brief episodes that were intended to link the action. Unfortunately, the 1948 premiere never materialized, so it was left to Nies to orchestrate the epigrammatic Quatre Episodes for the much-belated first airing of Voyages in December 1986. A similar misfortune befell L’Andalouse dans Barcelone, an utterly charming “little fantasie espagnole” designed to accompany a sequence of a dancing Andalusian gipsy (part of a documentary by the name of Croisieres avec l’escadre or “Cruises with the Fleet”). Alas, when Koechlin went to see the film for himself in 1934, he was crestfallen to discover that his music had been discarded altogether.

The performances are very good indeed. The admirable James Judd draws a stylish, secure response from his Berlin-based band; certainly, the strings of the Deutsches Symphony Orchestra produce an altogether more sumptuously refined sonority than do those of the Monte-Carlo PO under Alexandre Myrat on a rival EMI reissue (although Koechlin’s occasionally terrifyingly vertiginous writing would surely tax any group in the world). The recording is both rich and refined. Moreover, RCA’s copious documentation could hardly be more helpful. An intriguing, extremely well-realized issue.'

-- Andrew Achenbach, Gramophone

More reviews:
https://www.classical-music.com/reviews/orchestral/koechlin-4

https://www.amazon.com/Koechlin-Seven-Symphony-Douglas-Fairbanks/dp/B000025FO1

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Charles Koechlin (27 November 1867 – 31 December 1950) was a French composer, teacher and musicologist. Among his teachers at the Paris Conservatoire were Jules Massenet, Gabriel Fauré, Maurice Ravel and Jean Roger-Ducasse. He was a political radical all his life and a passionate enthusiast for such diverse things as medieval music, The Jungle Book of Rudyard Kipling, Johann Sebastian Bach, film stars (especially Lilian Harvey and Ginger Rogers), traveling, stereoscopic photography and socialism. As a composer, Koechlin was enormously prolific, and was highly eclectic in inspiration and technique.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Koechlin

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James Judd (born 30 October 1949) is a British conductor. He studied at the Trinity College of Music in London. After graduating Judd was an assistant conductor of The Cleveland Orchestra under Lorin Maazel, then associate music director of the European Union Youth Orchestra under Claudio Abbado. He was music director of the Florida Philharmonic (1987–2001), the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra (1999–2007), the Israel Symphony Orchestra Rishon LeZion, artistic director and principal conductor of the Daejeon Philharmonic Orchestra (2016–2022), and chief conductor of the Slovak Philharmonic (2017–2021).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Judd

https://www.jamesjudd.net/

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