#7 (12:40) and #11 (21:20) are with score
Amédée-Ernest Chausson (20 January 1855 – 10 June 1899) was a French romantic composer who died just as his career was beginning to flourish.
La tempête, Op. 18 (1888)
1. Act 1: Chant D’Ariel: ‘Sur Le Sable D’or’
2. Chant D’Ariel – Adagio: ‘Ton Pere Git A Cinq Brasses Profondes’ (2:32)
3. Act 2: Melodrame (6:12)
4. Chanson De Stephano: ‘Trois Mat’los, Et Puis Moi’ (8:21)
5. Chanson De Caliban: ‘C’est Fini Pour Moi De Scier Les Buches’ (10:21)
6. Act 3: Air (11:48)
7. Air de Danse (12:40)
8. Intermede (14:52)
9. Act 4: Scene Des Deesses: Melodrame (16:39)
10. Scene Des Deesses: Entree Et Duo: ‘Honneurs, Richesses…’ (17:46)
11. Scene Des Deesses: Danse De Nymphes Et Des Moissonneurs (21:20)
12. Intermede (26:08)
13. Solo De Cor (29:17)
Marie-Ange Todorovitch, Rephaelle Farman, Laurence Dale, Francois Le Roux, Jean-Philippe Lafont
Ensemble Orchestral de Paris dirigee par Jean-Jacques Kantorow
Description by Adrian Corleonis [-] Despite his uninhibited use of European sources, it is still a shock to hear Shakespeare rendered in French. When Chausson was tapped to provide incidental music for a production of The Tempest in 1888 at the Petit Théâtre des Marionettes, in the newly founded Galérie Vivienne, it was in the translation of his old law school chum, Maurice Boucher, whose poems “La Fleur des Eaux” and “La Mort de l’Amour” Chausson was just then setting in what would become his “answer” to the Liebestod, the Poème de l’amour et de la mer. If Boucher is recalled today, it is for Chausson’s settings, though in his time he was highly regarded. Massenet, for instance, congratulating Chausson on the success of Les Oiseaux — Aristophanes’ The Birds, another Théâtre des Marionettes production with Chausson’s incidental music — notes “Votre collaborateur est Maurice Boucher, un poète que j’aime absolument.” The Théâtre des Marionettes sparked a vogue, attracting elite audiences for which Boucher fashioned several original plays, including Tobie, Les Mystères d’Eleusis, Noël, and La Légende de Sainte Cécile, the last, again, with incidental music by Chausson. Shakespeare, too, was in fashion — in 1889 Edmond Haraucourt’s adaptation of The Merchant of Venice, with incidental music by Fauré, ran at the Odéon for a respectable 56 performances.
“Chausson spoke excellent German, reasonable Italian and passable Spanish,” his biographer, Jean Gallois, noted, “and bitterly regretted his lack of English.” It was not until 1890 that Chausson sought to correct this deficiency — Boucher put him in touch with a modest English teacher living quite close, Stéphane Mallarmé. Though lessons languished due to Chausson’s nomadic desertions with his family of his Paris home, the two men remained friends. The poetry of The Tempest takes on a prolix but curiously mercurial and disconcerting fluidity in French — “Full fathom five thy father lies…” becoming “Ton père git cinq brasses profondes” — which Chausson, in richest contrast to the dance-like robustness of Purcell, transmuted into rare, golden, evanescent fantasy opulently informing the brevity of his dozen numbers, playing, all told, a little over half an hour. Scored originally for a small orchestra of double woodwinds, two horns, two trumpets, tympani, gong, and string quartet for the Théâtre des Marionettes Chausson increases the music’s delicacy by reducing his forces to chamber music proportions — violin, viola, cello, flute, harp, and the newly invented celesta. The latter seems to have received its first use in score here, predating Tchaikovsky’s employment of it in The Nutcracker by four years.