Have you ever wondered what the point was in all that nineteenth-century screaming about colorful orchestration being inappropriate to symphonic discourse? You know what I mean: the near riot at the premiere of Franck’s Symphony in D minor because it used (gasp!) an English horn, or the hysteria about Mahler’s elaborate percussion sections, or the admiration awarded to otherwise dreary composers of the Leipzig school who exercised “restraint” in their scoring. Well, it turns out that the conventional wisdom had some justification, and the poster child that proves it, I submit, is Florent Schmitt’s Second Symphony.
Composed just a short time prior to his death in 1958, Schmitt in his mid eighties sounds just like Schmitt in his mid twenties: busy, dense, lushly textured, glamorous, and profuse with ideas that stubbornly refuse to stay fixed in the memory. Consisting of three well-blanced movements and lasting a modest twenty-seven minutes in this performance, the Second Symphony consistently catches the ear with one glitzy moment after another, but is it symphonic? Do we detect any kind of logic, evolution, drama, or development of its themes, or rather, does it sound very much like the coupled suites from Anthony and Cleopatra? If you opt for the latter, then don’t worry–you’re in good company. In other words, the piece contains twenty-seven minutes of aural distraction and little else; but if you know what to expect, it’s lots of fun in this vivid performance.
As for A&C, or Antoine et Cléopâtre–en Français as they say–this performance is a hair less exciting and a smidgeon less clearly recorded than JoAnn Falletta’s recent competing version for Naxos, but the Second Symphony provides a more substantial coupling than Schmitt’s The Haunted Palace on Falletta’s disc, so choice comes down to personal taste. I’m keeping both, and you might well want to do the same. It couldn’t hurt.
