Christoph Eschenbach , Conductor

BookletRoussel3 4/12/07 19:52 Page 1 OOrrcchehestrstreededePaParriiss CChhrriiststophophEEsscchenhenbacbachh RRoAoAllbbeuseusrtrt sselel SSyymphonmphonyyNNo.o.33 LLeeFFeeststinindedell’’aarraaignéeignée BookletRoussel3 4/12/07 19:52 Page 2 Albert Roussel (1869–1937) S y m p h o n y N o . 3 i n G m i n o r , O p . 4 2 1 I. Allegro vivo 6:04 2 II.Adagio 10:19 3 III.Vivace 3:22 4 IV.Allegro con spirito 6:30 L e F e s t i n d e l ’ a r a i g n é e , O p . 1 7 · The Spider’s Feast P a n t o m i m e b a l l e t i n o n e a c t t o a l i b r e t t o b y G i l b e r t d e V o i s i n s 5 Prélude 3:55 6 A garden. – Sitting in her web, a spider surveys the surroundings. 0:50 7 Entry of the ants. – They find a rose petal. – With great effort they lift the petal and carry it away. 1:28 8 Left alone, the spider daydreams and watches the landscape. – She checks the strength of her thread. – She mends her web with the thread she has drawn from her pocket. 1:41 9 Entry of the dung beetles. 0:50 bk The ants return. – They prepare to carry another petal, when a butterfly appears. 0:15 bl Dance of the butterfly. – The spider invites the butterfly to dance closer to her web. – The butterfly is caught in the web and struggles. – Death of the butterfly. 3:16 bm The spider rejoices. – She frees the butterfly from her web and takes it to her larder. 3:37 bn The spider dances. – Suddenly fruits come crashing down from a tree. The spider jumps backwards. 1:49 2 BookletRoussel3 4/12/07 19:52 Page 3 bo Fruit worms enter and prepare to revel in the fallen fruits. 0:58 bp Warlike entry of two praying mantises who lift their frightening blades and forbid anyone to approach. – The two worms approach and, moving between the mantises, quickly penetrate the fruits. 0:45 bq The ants dance in a circle. – The two mantises blame each other for the trick which was played upon them. 0:34 br The mantises challenge each other to a duel. – They fight. – The spider dances in order to make the mantises more excited. – The mantises become caught in the web. – The spider dances. 1:41 bs A mayfly hatches. 1:41 bt He dances. 3:23 ck The mayfly stops, exhausted. – The ants, the spider and finally the dung beetles pay their respects. – The mayfly rejects their advances. – The ants leave. – The worms come out of the fruit. 2:08 cl The mayfly and the fruit worms dance. 1:39 cm The mayfly dies. 0:32 cn The spider prepares to begin her feast, but one of the mantises, freed by the dung beetles from the web, slips behind the spider and kills her. 0:39 co Death throes of the spider 1:19 cp Funeral of the mayfly. – The funeral cortege sets off and vanishes into the distance. 1:55 cq Night falls on the deserted garden. 1:19 [59:41] Orchestre de Paris Christoph Eschenbach , conductor Recorded by Radio Classique Assistant Balance Engineers: Cover Design and Booklet Layout: Recordings: Paris, Théâtre Mogador, Perrine Ganjean, Laure Cazenave Eduardo Nestor Gomez March 2005 (Live) (Symphony No. 3), (Symphony No. 3) Booklet Editor: Jean-Christophe Hausmann Conservatoire de Paris, July 2005 Editing: Mitsou Carré P 2008 Ondine Inc., Helsinki (Le Festin de l’araignée) Publisher: Éditions Durand Executive Producers: Liner Notes: Damien Top, Centre Ondine Inc. Reijo Kiilunen, Kevin Kleinmann International Albert-Roussel, Cassel (France) Fredrikinkatu 77 A 2 Recording Producer: Mitsou Carré Photos:Gerry Ellis-Getty Images (Cover FIN-00100 Helsinki Balance Engineers: Mitsou Carré Photo), Damien Top Collection Tel.: +358.9.434.2210 (Symphony No. 3), Jean-Christophe (Albert Roussel, Le Festin de l’araignée) Fax: +358.9.493.956 Messonnier (Le Festin de l’araignée) Eric Brissaud (Christoph Eschenbach) E-mail: [email protected] 3 BookletRoussel3 4/12/07 19:52 Page 4 Albert Roussel and his wife in Varengeville (1928) BookletRoussel3 4/12/07 19:52 Page 5 Albert Roussel (1869–1937) In 1912, during the heyday of the Ballets Russes, the conductor Jacques Rouché profited from the findings of a study trip round Europe to examine the current state of continental theatre productions and to commission a ballet from Albert Roussel that was intended to build on the success of Ravel’s Ma Mère l’oye . Roussel was a former sailor who had studied first with Eugène Gigout, then under the benevolent but strict eye of Vincent d’Indy at the Schola Cantorum, quickly winning his spurs as a composer with a whole series of powerful yet sophisticated works, including a trio, sonata, songs, the Divertissement for wind quintet and piano and the symphonic prelude Résurrection. Based on memories of his own honeymoon in the Indies, the three pieces that make up Évocations were admired by the whole of the musical world when they were unveiled in May 1912. In the September of that year, Rouché suggested that the composer might consider setting a scenario by the Comte Gilbert de Voisins, a grandson of the famous dancer Marie Taglioni, based in turn on the Souvenirs entomologiques by Jean-Henri Fabre. Having just turned down a similar proposal, Roussel hesitated and accepted only on the insistence of his wife, whose prescience was as evident here as it was on so many other occasions. Having worked on the scenario, Roussel proceeded to impose his own particular vision on it: “Apart from the spider, which is both a role for a mime and a role for a dancer, male or female, there are two main subjects, the mayfly and the butterfly, whose dances are fairly well developed. […] The praying mantises are taken by mime artists; the dung beetles and the ants require no special qualities.” Roussel added to this cast list some maggots in 5 BookletRoussel3 4/12/07 19:52 Page 6 the form of the famous Foottit Clowns, whose mischievous bonhomie already looks forward to the unbridled atmosphere of Roussel’s operetta Le Testament de la tante Caroline. At the end of November, while staying at Bois- le-Roi, Roussel sketched “the garden theme […], which the flute states so timidly over the murmur of the violins”, completing the score on 2 February 1913. The legend that Roussel wrote L e F e s t i n d e l ’ a r a i g n é e (The Spider’s Feast) very quickly needs to be qualified: in order to meet the deadline for the performance, he reused his “Danse de l’oiseau sacré”, part of a ballet project on which he had worked with Ravel and Florent Schmitt, among others, but which had been aborted in 1909, by which date Roussel alone had completed his part of the commission. The instrumentation subtly exploits the instruments’different registers and characterizes each of the protagonists by an appropriate use of timbre. Le Festin de l’araignée recalls not only the Impressionism of Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune of 1892 but also a sense of delicacy that is clearly in awe of Ravel’s aesthetic and that is here combined with the solidity of conception of d’Indy’s L’Après-midi sous les pins of 1905. The first performance took place at the Théâtre des Arts on 3 April 1913, with non-traditional choreography by Léo Staats and designs by Maxime Dethomas. The conductor was Gabriel Grovlez. This same year produced a plentiful harvest of new and exciting works that included The Rite of Spring and Jeux. Roussel later recalled that “I wrote this little ballet very quickly and certainly did not foresee the success that it would enjoy in the concert hall, as I regarded it as no more than a divertissement of no great significance.” Like Saint-Saëns, who refused to allow his Carnaval des animaux to be staged, Roussel was annoyed by the unfailing success of his “little score” as it overshadowed his other works. And yet the atrocity of this ballet-pantomime is typical of its composer: in spite of the extraordinary skill of the 6 BookletRoussel3 4/12/07 19:52 Page 7 orchestration and the liveliness of the writing, it is a tragic work, a meditation on life that prefigures Padmâvatî in reflecting the climate of the age. In the silence and shadow of this prelapsarian Garden of Eden, the Butterfly, Spider and, above all, the Mayfly symbolize the carefree world of the pre-war period as it careered towards the abyss. Roussel’s Second Symphony marked a stylistic transition brought about by the end of the First World War.The composer settled on the French coast near Dieppe in 1920, and from then on a Greek classicism and a fondness for the 18th century imbued his songs, as well as chamber works such as Joueurs de flûte and orchestral scores such as the Suite in F. Roussel adopted “a clearer style, the culmination of a more completely personal quest for the realization of pure music”. Olivier Messiaen thought that “All French music now seems to me to be polarized on the one hand by Albert Roussel – namely, the composer of the Suite in F and the symphonies – and, on the other, by early Stravinsky.” It was to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his Boston Symphony Orchestra that Serge Koussevitzky commissioned a series of works from Honegger (the Symphony in C), Stravinsky (the Symphony of Psalms), Hindemith (the Konzertmusik op.

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