Day 50
Franck Le Chasseur maudit
Orchestre Nationals de Lyon
Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider
To many of us the name César Franck is almost always followed by the word Symphony. Though Franck is not quite a 'one-piece' composer the ubiquity of the symphony does tend to get in the way of anything else he wrote. Perhaps that 'does' should be replaced by 'did' because it has to be said that the symphony has all but disappeared from the repertoire these days. Indeed one conductor I talked to said that in his view is had almost become a 'Youth Orchestra piece' and that certainly seems to be the case. I first encountered in Youth Orchestra, though I have played it against since.
I'm vaguely aware of some of Franck's piano music and I recall rather bashing through the piano part of the violin sonata at University but other than that Franck is rather a closed book to me. Certainly I have not heard this symphonic poem before.
I thought that it was great fun. Lots of atmosphere throughout with some rousing hunting calls at the beginning, a chase, and then some ghostly music towards the end. It was more harmonically adventurous than I had expected given what I knew of Franck's style. I did however find it relied too much on short sequences and repetitive rhythms - Beethoven might have been able to carry off endless dactyls in the 7th symphony but I think that they got rather tiresome here.
The only other problem with this type of music is the one which I mentioned in connection with Liszt on day 19. What was at the time a fresh new idiom of descriptive music has become over-familiar over the years though use in film and TV scores and so now can sound rather clichéd. That's hardly the composer's fault but it does sometime get in the way of proper appreciation. It reminds me of the saying - attributed to many different people - 'the definition of an intellectual is somebody who can listed to the William Tell overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger'
No comments:
Post a Comment