Stéphane Denève’s Roussel recordings for Naxos are far and away the most comprehensively satisfying in the catalog. This final installment provides a worthy and memorable conclusion to the series. In the first place, the two suites from Roussel’s magnificent opera-ballet Pâdmavatî are all but unknown, either in concert or on disc. They are wonderful, not least because the obligatory touches of Eastern exoticism are fully integrated into Roussel’s personal idiom. All of his music, even the lightest or the most purely tactile and voluptuous, has substance.
This is especially true of his shimmering, impressionist ballet The Spider’s Feast (oddly referred to as “The Spider’s Banquet” on the CD booklet, which is fine, and as “The Spider’s Web” on the tray card, which is just a mistake). Although Roussel prepared a suite in the form of “symphonic fragments”, there’s no gratuitous musical flab here, and the work always should be performed complete. The scoring is astonishing, given the amazing range of timbres and textures that Roussel conjures from relatively small forces: two flutes (one doubling piccolo), two oboes (one doubling English horn), pairs of clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets, timpani, percussion, harp, celeste, and strings.
As already suggested, these performances are as good as they come. Denève has an unerring feel for Roussel’s idiom, for that combination of rhythmic drive, precision of accent, and elegant phrasing that somehow seems both personal to this composer as well as quintessentially French. Beyond that, he gets excellent, truly refined playing from the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, and he’s expertly recorded. Essential.
