Various Composers - French Ballet Music of the 1920s (Geoffrey Simon)

Information

• L'éventail de Jeanne (Jean's Fan)
• Les mariés de la tour Eiffel (The Wedding Party on the Eiffel Tower)

Philharmonia Orchestra

Geoffrey Simon, conductor

Date: 1984

Label: Chandos

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Review

The Naughty Nineties, the Swinging Sixties—journalists delight in docketing decades with alliterative adjectives. They might have called the Bright Young Things era (how long ago that sounds!) the Teasing Twenties, when it was de rigueur to try to be outrageous and 'amusing': in the musical world, this took the form of reacting against romantic and highflown ideals and embracing the proletarian tone of the circus and fairground. The passing of time has softened the impact of this iconoclasm (not least in view of the far greater musical outrages committed since), and the impression left, certainly by this pair of Parisian ballet scores of the 1920s, is merely of agreeable light-hearted music by highly professional, if rarely inspired, craftsmen.

The earlier of the two, Les maries de la Tour Eiffel, was a joint effort by all of Les Six except Durey (who had already seceded to become an ardent Communist) for a Swedish Ballet production in 1921 to a jokey surrealist scenario by Cocteau. The score and parts were mislaid until 1956, and even then one movement by Milhaud had been irretrievably lost: he was eventually persuaded to write a substitute piece (for the fat boy pelting the wedding-guests with ping-pong balls) in 1971, with the result that stylistically this sticks out awkwardly from the rest of the score. (The inclusion of this movement justifies the claim of ''first recording'', since it was missing from the performance conducted by Milhaud on Ades 15501-not submitted for review). But there is much gaiety in the work as a whole, particularly in Auric's jolly jiggy Ritournelles and Milhaud's comedy wedding march, which is later quoted by Honegger (who also slips in a slowed-down version of the Faust waltz) in his funeral march for the boring old General who gets eaten by the lion which jumps out of the photographer's camera. (I did say the plot was surrealist.)

The Jeanne in the other work's title was the wealthy Jeanne Dubost, who, besides being a fashionable hostess and art patroness, ran a children's ballet school. In 1927 she asked ten of her musician friends each to contribute a dance for her pupils, presenting each with a leaf from her fan. The initial private performance of the whole was so successful that the work was repeated two years later at the Opera (with the ten-year-old Toumanova making her debut in it). A more serious ballet musically than the other on this record (except for Milhaud's wrong-note polka), most of the movements were in traditional dance forms: the orchestration ranged from chamber proportions in the Ferroud Marche to the swollen in Schmitt's Kermesse-Valse (how this was shoe-horned into Mme Dubost's salon is a mystery). Poulenc's Pastourelle is the only item in it to be well known; Ravel's miniature Fanfare is delightful; and Ibert's Valse cheekily quotes Ravel's Valses nobles et sentimentales; but the ballet suite as a whole is far from being 'children's music'—indeed, Roussel's Sarabande, with its dissonant polytonal counterpoint, strikes an unexpectedly sombre note.

All this music, Gallic in its unsentimental clarity, demands the cleanest and crispest playing, and this the Philharmonia Orchestra admirably supplies. The fidelity of the sound quality, brilliantly vivid in the Eiffel Tower ballet, is even heightened on CD.

-- Lionel Salter

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Les Six is a name given to a group of six composers, including Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Arthur Honegger, Georges Auric, Louis Durey and Germaine Tailleferre. The French critic Henri Collet originated the label Les Six in his article “The Russian Five, the French Six, and M. Erik Satie” (Comoedia, January 1920). The group's music music is often seen as a neoclassic reaction against both the musical style of Richard Wagner and the Impressionist music of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. Les Six performed together in a number of concerts, and they collaborated on the play-ballet Les Mariés de la tour Eiffel.

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Geoffrey Simon (born 3 July 1946 in Adelaide) is an Australian conductor. He was a student of Herbert von Karajan, Rudolf Kempe, Hans Swarowsky and Igor Markevitch. His music directorships have included the Albany Symphony Orchestra (New York), the Australian Sinfonia (London), the Bloomington Symphony Orchestra (Indiana), the Orquestra Simfònica de Balears "Ciutat de Palma" (Majorca) and the Sacramento Symphony (California). Simon has made 45 recordings for a number of labels, including his own Cala Records, combining familiar works with world premieres of rediscovered obscure works.

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