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French music

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rbert12
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« Reply #45 on: August 07, 2013, 02:56:23 pm »

This music was from a program dedied to Raymond Gallois-Montbrun, so perhaps this limits a Little the scope of the mystery.
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« Reply #46 on: February 25, 2014, 03:57:35 pm »

Three French Piano Concerti




From the collection of Karl Miller




Francis Poulenc: Piano Concerto

Composer, Piano
ORTF/Charles Munch
1st European Perfomance
Radio Broadcast
[6 January 1950]
1. Allegretto
2. Andante con moto
3. Rondeau à la française

Description from Allmusic.com
This was the last of Poulenc's five concertos. While in the first fifteen years of his career Poulenc had made a reputation as a light-hearted composer, personal crises in the late 1930s awakened a dormant religious sensibility. Thereafter, including the war years, he had written music of considerably more seriousness of purpose, but even in them retained his lightness of touch and his ability to charm. After the war ended, restoring communication between Paris and America, the Boston Symphony Orchestra commissioned this piano concerto from Poulenc. It was premiered by that orchestra, conducted by Charles Munch on January 6, 1950, with the composer as soloist.

Now Poulenc returned, for this composition, to his earlier breezy style. The composition is in three movements, each smaller than the previous one; their lengths are about ten, five and a half, and four minutes. The piano is not treated as an individual protagonist against the orchestra, but as a part of the entire ensemble.

The concerto opens with the piano playing one of Poulenc's rhythmic ideas of faux gruffness, which is countered by a lovely tune on English horn. The slow second movement is tender, with a sense of some sadness, using a string melody introduced with softly marching rhythms in the horns. The finale is called Rondeau ˆ la Francaise and is in a very fast tempo. In one of the final episodes a tune appears which has been traced back to A la claire fontaine, an old sea chanty dating back to the time of Lafayette. Its first few notes are the same as that of Foster's song "Old Folks at Home" (or "Swanee River"), which some French commentators have mid-identified as a "Negro spiritual." Poulenc blends it, surprisingly, with a Brazilian maxixe rhythm.


Germaine Tailleferre: Piano Concerto in D (1924)

Penelope Thwaites, Piano
BBC Concerto Orchestra/Gregory Rose
Radio Broadcast.

1. Allegro
2. Adagio
3. Final. Allegro non troppo


Wikipedia Bio:

Germaine Tailleferre (French: [tɑjfɛʁ]; 19 April 1892 – 7 November 1983) was a French composer and the only female member of the group of composers known as Les Six.

She was born Marcelle Taillefesse at Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, Val-de-Marne, France, but as a young woman she changed her last name to "Tailleferre" to spite her father, who had refused to support her musical studies. She studied piano with her mother at home, composing short works of her own, after which she began studying at the Paris Conservatory where she met Louis Durey, Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric and Arthur Honegger. At the Paris Conservatory her skills were rewarded with prizes in several categories. Most notably Tailleferre wrote 18 short works in the Petit livre de harpe de Madame Tardieu for Caroline Tardieu, the Conservatory’s Assistant Professor of Harp.

With her new friends, she soon was associating with the artistic crowd in the Paris districts of Montmartre and Montparnasse including the sculptor Emmanuel Centore who later married her sister Jeanne. It was in the Montparnasse atelier of one of her painter friends where the initial idea for Les Six began. The publication of Jean Cocteau's manifesto Le coq et l'Arlequin resulted in Henri Collet's media articles that led to instant fame for the group, of which Tailleferre was the only female member.

In 1923, Tailleferre began to spend a great deal of time with Maurice Ravel at his home in Monfort-L'Amaury. Ravel encouraged her to enter the Prix de Rome Competition. In 1925, she married Ralph Barton, an American caricaturist, and moved to Manhattan, New York. She remained in the United States until 1927 when she and her husband returned to France. They divorced shortly thereafter.

Tailleferre wrote many of her most important works during the 1920s, including her 1st Piano Concerto, the Harp Concertino, the ballets Le marchand d'oiseaux (the most frequently performed ballet in the repertoire of the Ballets suédois during the 1920s) and La nouvelle Cythère which was commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev for the ill-fated 1929 season of the famous Ballets Russes, and Sous les ramparts d'Athènes in collaboration with Paul Claudel, as well as several pioneering film scores, including B'anda, in which she used African themes.

The 1930s was even more fruitful, with the Concerto for Two Pianos, Choeurs, Saxophones and Orchestra, the Violin Concerto, the operas Zoulaïna and Le marin de Bolivar, and her masterwork, La cantate de Narcisse in collaboration with Paul Valéry. Her work in film music included Le petit chose by Maurice Cloche, and a series of documentaries.

At the outbreak of World War II, she was forced to leave the majority of her scores at her home in Grasse, with the exception of her recently completed Three Études for Piano and Orchestra. Escaping across Spain to Portugal, she found passage on a boat that brought her to the United States, where she lived the war years in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

After the war, in 1946, she returned to her home in France, where she composed orchestral and chamber music, plus numerous other works including the ballets Paris-Magie (with Lise Delarme) and Parisiana (for the Royal Ballet of Copenhaugen), the operas Il était un petit navire (with Henri Jeanson), Dolores, La petite sirène (with Philip Soupault, based on Hans Christian Andersen's story "The Little Mermaid") and Le maître (to a libretto by Ionesco), the musical comedy Parfums, the Concerto des vaines paroles, for baritone voice, piano and orchestra, the Concerto for Soprano and Orchestra, the Concertino for Flute, Piano and Orchestra, the Second Piano Concerto, the Concerto for Two Guitars and Orchestra, her Second Sonata for Violin and Piano, the Sonata for Harp, as well as an impressive number of film and television scores. The majority of this music was not published until after her death.

In 1976, she accepted the post of accompanist for a children's music and movement class at the École alsacienne, a private school in Paris. During the last period of her life, she concentrated mainly on smaller forms, due to increasing problems with arthritis in her hands. She nevertheless produced the Sonate champêtre for oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and piano, The Sonata for Two Pianos, Choral and Variations for Two Pianos or Orchestra, a series of children's songs (on texts by Jean Tardieu) and pieces for young pianists. Her last major work was the Concerto de la fidelité for coloratura soprano and orchestra, which was premièred at the Paris Opera the year before her death.

Germaine Tailleferre continued to compose right up until a few weeks before her death, on 7 November 1983 in Paris. She is buried in Quincy-Voisins, Seine-et-Marne, France.



Henri Barraud: Piano Concerto(1939)

1. Allegro
2. Andante
3. Finale
Alain Lefévre, Piano
ORTF/Manueal Rosenthal
Radio Broadcast


Wikipedia Bio:
Henry Barraud (sometimes Henri) (23 April 1900 – 28 December 1997) was a French composer.

He was born in Bordeaux. He was a student of Louis Aubert at the Conservatoire de Paris, but in 1927 failed to graduate, apparently because of his refusal to follow orthodox methods. Along with Pierre-Octave Ferroud and Jean Rivier, he helped to form the society Triton for the wider distribution of contemporary music.

After the Liberation of Paris in 1944, he was named the Director of Paris Radio, and later, in 1948, of what later became ORTF, a position he held until his retirement in 1965.
 


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« Reply #47 on: February 26, 2014, 03:17:56 pm »

Music of Jean-Michel Damase


From the collection of Karl Miller


Rameau Variations for Harpsichord and Orchestra(1966)
Robert Veyron-Lacroix, Harpsichord
ORTF/Andre Girard

Concertino for Harp and Strings (1951)

Performers and venue unknown

Serenade for Flute and Strings, Op. 36 (1956)
Composed at the Request of Jean-Pierre Rampal
James Dower, Flute
Langham Chamber Orchestra/Maurice Handford
Radio Broadcast


Introduction and Bio from www.chezdamase.com

 Born on 27 January 1928 and died 21 April 2013, Jean-Michel Damase composed in a style often compared to Fauré, Poulenc, Ravel, Françaix, Roussel, and Stravinsky; incorporating many of the rhythmic and harmonic complexities associated with twentieth-century French music. Throughout his career, Damase has remained a traditionalist, "continuing the post-tonal line of Debussy and Ravel without the modish interest in their deeper-seated implications."* Or, in the composers own words:​

Quote
"I prefer sincerity to forced innovation."

Damase's music is accessible without being lightweight; unapologetically melodic, with a penchant for repeating – some have even said "obsessive" – motifs; tonal, though paradoxically, harmonically complex; rhythmically surprising; sometimes playful, sometimes biting – but always resolving; respectful of tradition and form; often demanding virtuosic ability and endurance of the performer; and always superbly crafted.​


Born in 1928 in Bordeaux into a musical family, his mother being the renown harpist and musician Micheline Kahn, Jean-Michel Damase showed precocious musical talent. His studies began at an early age; when he was five he began the Samuel-Rousseau courses in piano and solfège.

Damase began composing at the age of nine. After Colette, his mother's friend, heard song settings of her poems, she wrote three "poèmes d'animaux" especially for him. When he was twelve, he became a pupil of Cortot at the École Normale de Musique de Paris, and in the next year he joined Armand Ferté’s piano classes at the Paris Conservatoire.

In 1943, he was unanimously awarded the Premier Prix in piano at the Conservatoire. Two years later he entered Henri Büsser's composition classes and began to study harmony and counterpoint with Dupré. At nineteen, he won the first prize in composition with his Quintet for flute, harp, violin , viola, and cello and his cantata Et la belle se réveilla won him the Prix de Rome. In the meantime, his career as a pianist was flourishing; he appeared as soloist in the Colonne and Conservatoire concerts and with the Orchestre National de la Radiodiffusion et Télévision Française (l'ORTF).

Damase's youthful compositional maturity helped to foster a considerable technical facility and he has produced a great deal of music in a style that is attractive and elegant, remaining close to the traditions of the Conservatoire. All his works show deep knowledge of the possibilities of instruments, and his orchestration is rich, full and varied; evidenced most notably in the chamber and concertante works.

Damase has a great admiration for Fauré and Ravel. As a pianist, he has made award-winning recordings of many of their works. He is also great lover of ballet and a close friend of several leading choreographers. His first ballet score was La Croqueuse de diamants (The Gold Digger) written for Roland Petit and first produced at the Marigny Theatre in Paris. The complete ballet is also featured in the film Un, Deux, Trois, Quatre (1960)​.

After touring the world as a piano soloist and winning the Grand Prix du Disque for his recordings, Jean-Michel Damase has devoted his activities to composition and teaching. He serves on the boards of numerous international musical organizations and societies, judges competitions, and conducts master classes in Europe, the United States and Japan. He was awarded the Grand Prix Musical de la SACD (Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques) and the Grand Prix de la Ville de Paris.

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« Reply #48 on: March 18, 2014, 04:17:07 pm »

Paul Le Flem: Fantasie for Piano and Orchesta

From the collection of Karl Miller

Fantasie for Piano and Orchestra
Annie d'Arco, Piano
Rennes Theater Orchestra/Pierre Michel Le Conte


Paul Le Flem
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Paul Le Flem (18 March 1881 - 31 July 1984) was a French composer and music critic.


Biography

Born in Radon, Orne, and living most of his life in Lezardrieux, Le Flem studied at the Schola Cantorum under Vincent d'Indy and Albert Roussel, later teaching at the same establishment, where his pupils included Erik Satie and André Jolivet. His music is strongly influenced by his native Brittany, the landscape of which is reflected in most of his work.

Before World War I, Le Flem produced several major works, including his First Symphony, a Fantasy for Piano and Orchestra, and an opera. The war temporarily put an end to his compositional activities, and in its aftermath he devoted himself to music criticism and choral conducting. He wrote numerous articles for the periodical Comoedia.

In 1938, he began composing once again. Three additional symphonies and a second opera followed before he was finally forced to give up composition in 1976, at the age of 95, due to blindness. He died on 31 July 1984 at the age of 103.

Some of his dramatic works include the operas Le rossignol de St-Malo (The Nightingale of St Malo) and La magicienne de la mer (The Magician of the Sea), as well as a version of the chante-fable Aucassin et Nicolette. For the Dead and the seven Children's Pieces, both originally written in 1912, were orchestrated some years later. Two of the composer's children died young, and For the Dead is dedicated to their memory. In addition to his symphonies, Le Flem wrote evocative orchestral music such as En mer (At Sea) and La voix du large (The Voice of the Open Sea). Le Flem also composed the music for Jean Tedesco's short film The Great Gardener of France in 1942.
Personal life

Paul Le Flem, with his wife, Jeanne (Even), is the grandfather of actress Marika Green and great-grandfather of actress Eva Green by his daughter, Jeanne, who married Swedish journalist Lennart Green.[1][2][3]
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« Reply #49 on: December 04, 2014, 04:12:09 pm »

20th Century French Piano Concerti


From the collection of Karl Miller




Works:

Jacques Dupont (Jacque-Dupont) "Divertissment 1948" Concerto for Piano and Orchestra
(Premiere)
Composer, Piano
Paris Conservatory Orchestra
Pierre Le Conte, Conductor
Radio Broadcast



Jacques Casterede: Concerto No. 1 for Piano and Strings
Marie Claude Werchowski, piano
ORTF Chamber Orchestra/Pierre Monet, Conductor


Christian Manen: Piano Concerto, Op 30(1957)
Aline Von Berenson, piano
ORTF
Conducted by Pierre Dervaux


Claude Pascal: Piano Concerto (1958)
Genevieve Joy, Piano
ORTF Chamber Orchestra
Conducted by Andre Girad


Samsmon Francois: Piano Concerto
Societe des Concerts du Conservatoire
Samson Francois, Piano
Conducted by Georges Tzipine
Source LP: Pathe FCX 229



Rene Challan: Concerto Pastoral
Conducted by Georges Tzipine
Source LP: Pathe FCX 229




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« Reply #50 on: December 04, 2014, 04:44:37 pm »

Mr. Jowcol - delightful to hear from you; it's been a wee while. Thanks as always for taking the trouble to upload for us...bit of a rare event here nowadays !
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« Reply #51 on: December 05, 2014, 02:59:41 am »

I have to confess I'm sitting on more goodies-  what is normally the slowest time of the year at work has turned into the busiest. But I'm glad to get the chance to share, and thank Karl for taking time our from his business for some volunteer work.

I'm holding a 15 hour collection of work by a little known American composer....  just to create a bit of excitement....
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« Reply #52 on: December 07, 2014, 10:30:49 pm »

It's come to my attention that the first movement of the Francois is silent.   I'm looking into it.
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« Reply #53 on: December 14, 2014, 01:22:25 pm »

Warning : The recording of Jean-Michel Damase's "Concertino for Harp and Strings" (1951) is incomplete : the first four minutes are missing. This concertino lasts c. 13 minutes. Cf. this other performance on CD :
http://www.amazon.fr/gp/product/B00LCQAPAG/ref=dm_ws_sp_ps_dp
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« Reply #54 on: February 06, 2015, 07:26:39 pm »

Music of Charles Koechlin

From the collection of Karl Miller



Works:


Volume 1:


Hymne au Soleil Op 127
(1st Movement Symphonie d'hymnes)
Edited break due to side change of cassette
BBC Concert Orchestra/Gary Brain


Hymne a la Nuit, Op. 48 no.1
(2nd Movement of Symphonie d'hymnes)
ORTF/Franz Andre


Symphonie No. 1, Op 57bis
ORTF/Manuel Rosenthal


Organ Chorale in F Minor Op. 90bis
Graham Barber organ

Le Jeu de la Nativite for small Orchestra
(Performers announced)

Volume 2:


Vers la Voute Etoilee
Berlin Philharmonic/ Zoltan Pesko

Liberte, Op. 153
From July 14th Incidental  Music for a play by Romain Rolland
Chorale de la Prefecture de Police
Musique des Gardiens de la Paix
Desire Dondeyne, Conductor
Chant du  Monde, LDX-M_8197


L'Abbaye
Chorus of Jeunesse Musicale de France
Organist Announced
Lyric Orchestra
Louis Martini, Conductor
Masterworks from France, Program 107


Classic Walpurgis Night Op. 38
ORTF/Andre Girard

Seven Stars Symphony, Op. 132
London Philharmonic/ Norman del Mar




Wikipedia Bio:
Charles Louis Eugène Koechlin (French: [ʃaʁl lwi øʒɛn keklɛ̃]; 27 November 1867 – 31 December 1950) was a French composer, teacher and writer on music. 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. He once said: "The artist needs an ivory tower, not as an escape from the world, but as a place where he can view the world and be himself. This tower is for the artist like a lighthouse shining out across the world."[1]

Life
Koechlin was born in Paris, and was the youngest child of a large family. His mother's family came from Alsace and he identified with that region; his maternal grandfather had been the noted philanthropist and textile manufacturer Jean Dollfus, and Koechlin inherited his strongly developed social conscience. His father died when he was 14. Though he was early interested in music his family wanted him to become an engineer. He entered the École Polytechnique in 1887 but the following year was diagnosed with tuberculosis and had to spend six months recuperating in Algeria. He had to repeat his first year at the École and graduated with only mediocre grades. After a struggle with his family and private lessons with Charles Lefebvre he entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1890 studying first with Antoine Taudou for harmony. In 1892 he started studying with Massenet for composition, André Gedalge for fugue and counterpoint, and Louis Bourgault-Ducoudray for musical history. His fellow-pupils included George Enescu, Ernest Le Grand, Reynaldo Hahn, Max d'Ollone, Henri Rabaud, and Florent Schmitt. From 1896 he was a pupil of Gabriel Fauré, where his fellow-pupils now included Ravel and Jean Roger-Ducasse. Fauré had a major influence on Koechlin; in fact Koechlin wrote the first Fauré biography (1927), a work which is still of value. In 1898 a grateful Koechlin orchestrated the popular suite from Fauré's Pelléas et Mélisande and in 1900 assisted Fauré in the production of the huge open-air drama Promethée.

After his graduation Koechlin became a freelance composer and teacher. He married Suzanne Pierrard in 1903, but after 1921 regularly corresponded with his former student, composer Catherine Murphy Urner in California. In 1909 he began regular work as a critic for the Chronique des Arts and in 1910 was one of the founders, with Ravel, of the Société musicale indépendante, with whose activities he was intensely associated. From its inception in the early 1930s to his death he was a passionate supporter of the International Society for Contemporary Music, eventually becoming practitioner of its French section. From 1937 he was elected practitioner of the Fédération Musicale Populaire. At first comfortably off, he divided his time between Paris and country homes in Villers-sur-Mer and the Côte d'Azur, but after the onset of World War I his circumstances were progressively reduced, he was forced to sell one of his houses and, from 1915, took work lecturing and teaching. Partly due to his vigorous championing of younger composers and new styles, he was never successful in his attempts to gain a permanent teaching position for himself, though he was an examiner for many institutions (e.g. the Conservatoires of Brussels, Rheims and Marseilles). He was rejected for the post of Professor of counterpoint and fugue at the Paris Conservatoire in 1926 by 20 votes to two (the two being Albert Roussel and Maurice Emmanuel), but from 1935 to 1939 he was allowed to teach fugue and modal polyphony at the Schola Cantorum.

He visited the USA four times to lecture and teach in 1918-19, 1928, 1929 and 1937. On the second and third visits he taught at the University of California, Berkeley, through arrangements made by Catherine Urmer, who afterward lived with him until 1933.[2] On the 1929 visit his symphonic poem La Joie païenne won the Hollywood Bowl Prize for Composition and was performed there under the baton of Eugene Goossens. Even so, Koechlin had to pay for the preparation of orchestral parts, and in the 1930s he sank most of his savings into organizing performances of some of his orchestral works. In the 1940s, however, the music department of Belgian Radio took up his cause and broadcast several premieres of important scores including the first complete performance of the Jungle Book cycle. He died, and his body is buried, at his country home at Le Canadel, Var, aged 83. Some of his papers are housed at the University of California at Berkeley Library, donated by Catherine Urmer's husband Charles Rollins Shatto.[3] In 1940, the French government offered him the award of Chevalier de la Legion d'honneur, but he refused it.

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« Reply #55 on: February 06, 2015, 07:28:51 pm »

Continued Biography of Charles Koechlin from Wikipedia:

Style and compositions
Koechlin was enormously prolific, as the worklist below (by no means exhaustive) suggests. He was highly eclectic in inspiration (nature, the mysterious orient, French folksong, Bachian chorale, Hellenistic culture, astronomy, Hollywood movies, etc.) and musical technique, but the expressive core of his language remained distinct from his contemporaries. At the start of his career he concentrated on songs with orchestral accompaniment, few of which were performed as intended during his lifetime. A recent (2006) recording of a selection (Hänssler Classic CD93.159) shows he was already master of an individual impressionism deriving less from Debussy than from Berlioz and Fauré. Thereafter he concentrated on symphonic poems, chamber and instrumental works.

After World War I his continuing devotion to the symphonic poem and the large orchestra at a period when neoclassicism and small ensembles were more fashionable may have discouraged performance and acceptance of his works. His compositions include the four symphonic poems and three orchestral songs making up Livre de la jungle after Rudyard Kipling; many other symphonic poems including Le Buisson Ardent after Romain Rolland (this is a diptych of two orchestral poems, performable separately) and Le Docteur Fabricius after a novel by his uncle Charles Dollfus; three string quartets; five symphonies including a Seven Stars Symphony inspired by Hollywood; sonatas for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, violin, viola and cello, and much other chamber music; many songs, over two hundred opus numbers in all; and a vast number of monodies, fugal studies, chorale harmonizations and other educational pieces. Many works remain unpublished, however.

He wrote in several styles, sometimes severe Baroque counterpoint, as in the fugue that opens his Second Symphony (unrecorded as of 2005), sometimes "impressionistically" as in the tone poem Au Loin, or, as in the Symphony No. 2's scherzo, yet more astringently. He could go from extreme simplicity to extreme complexity of texture and harmony from work to work, or within the same work. Some of his most characteristic effects come from a very static treatment of harmony, savouring the effect of, for instance, a stacked-up series of fifths through the whole gamut of the instruments. His melodies are often long, asymmetrical and wide-ranging in tessitura. He was closely interested in the works of Schoenberg, some of which he quoted from memory in his treatise on Orchestration. The twelve tone technique is one of the several modern music styles parodied in the 'Jungle Book' symphonic poem Les Bandar-Log, but Koechlin also wrote a few pieces in what he described as the 'style atonal-sériel'. He was fascinated by the movies and wrote many 'imaginary' film scores and works dedicated to the Hollywood actress Lilian Harvey, on whom he had a crush.
Lilian Harvey

His Seven Stars Symphony features movements inspired by Douglas Fairbanks, Lilian Harvey, Greta Garbo, Clara Bow, Marlene Dietrich, Emil Jannings and Charlie Chaplin in some of their most famous film roles. He also composed an Epitaph for Jean Harlow and a suite of dances for Ginger Rogers. He was interested in using unusual instruments, notably the saxophone and the early electronic instrument the Ondes Martenot. One movement of the Second Symphony requires four of them (and has not usually been included in the few performances of the work, for that reason). He also wrote several pieces for the hunting-horn, an instrument he himself played. Koechlin orchestrated several pieces by other composers. In addition to the Fauré Pelléas et Mélisande suite mentioned above he orchestrated the bulk of Claude Debussy's 'legende dansée' Khamma under the composer's direction, from the piano score [1], and orchestrated Cole Porter's ballet Within the Quota; other works he transcribed include Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy and Chabrier's Bourrée fantasque.

As educator and author
Koechlin began assisting Fauré in teaching fugue and counterpoint while he was still a student in the 1890s, but though he taught privately and was an external examiner for the Paris Conservatoire throughout his career, he never occupied a permanent salaried teaching position. Composers who studied with him included Germaine Tailleferre, Roger Désormière, Francis Poulenc and Henri Sauguet. Cole Porter studied orchestration with him in 1923-24. Darius Milhaud, though never a pupil, became a close friend and considered he learned more from Koechlin than any other pedagogue. Koechlin wrote three compendious textbooks: one on Harmony (3 vols, 1923-6), one on Music Theory (1932-4) and a huge treatise on the subject of orchestration (4 vols, 1935–43) which is a classic treatment of the subject. He also wrote a number of smaller didactic works, as well as the life of Fauré mentioned above.

Character
Despite his lack of worldly success Koechlin was apparently a loved and venerated figure in French music, his long flowing beard contributing to his patriarchal image. Following his 1888 illness the need to build up his strength led him to become an enthusiastic mountaineer, swimmer and tennis player. He was also an amateur astronomer and an accomplished photographer. He was one of the great nature-mystics among French composers, whose personal creed was pantheistic rather than Christian. Though never a member of the Communist Party he subscribed to its ideals, and in the later 1930s especially was much concerned with the idea of 'Music for the People'.


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« Reply #56 on: February 10, 2015, 08:49:44 pm »

July 14th Incidental Music for a play by Romain Rolland


From the collection of Karl Miller

Overture /​ Jacques Ibert
Palais-Royal /​ Georges Auric
Introduction et marche funèbre /​ Darius Milhaud
Prélude /​ Albert Roussel
Liberté /​ Charles Koechlin
Marche sur la Bastille /​ Arthur Honegger
Fête de la liberté /​ Daniel Lazarus


Chorale de la Préfecture de police
Musique des Gardiens de la paix
Désiré Dondeyne, conductor
Source LP: LDX-M-8197


Curtain Designs for play by Picasso:



Cover for second vinyl release in 1976:


PDF of the play (in French) available here:
https://archive.org/download/le14juilletactio00roll/le14juilletactio00roll.pdf



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« Reply #57 on: February 10, 2015, 09:43:25 pm »

Corrected file from the Francois Piano Concerto

Courtesy of Karl Miller


For those of you who were puzzled by the silent first movement of the Francois piano concerto, Karl has sent me a replacement version.  If you go the the Collection of 20 Century French Piano Concerti in the Downloads section, you will see the new link.





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« Reply #58 on: March 02, 2015, 08:40:20 pm »

More Music of Charles Koechlin

From the collection of Karl Miller

This disc should have been with the last collection-- we had some problems with it, and Karl sent a replacement.  I've numbered and tagged these files as a continuation of the previous post. 

The Composer Speaks (in French, and English Translation)
Poem for Horn and Orchestra, Op 70

Performers, venue and date unknown
Symphony No 2 Op 196
I. Fugue on a subject by Ernest La Grand
II Scherzo: L'ame libre et Fantastique
III Andante( a suite of 6 chorales)
IV. Fugue modale sur un subject de Catherine Urner
V Final
London Philharmonic
Cond by Constantine Silvestri, 1967
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« Reply #59 on: March 11, 2015, 02:43:25 am »

Corrected file from the Francois Piano Concerto

Courtesy of Karl Miller


For those of you who were puzzled by the silent first movement of the Francois piano concerto, Karl has sent me a replacement version.  If you go the the Collection of 20 Century French Piano Concerti in the Downloads section, you will see the new link.

Permission Denied by Mediafire :(






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