Maurice Ravel Conducts Boléro (2009)

The sound of Dutton's disc of early twentieth century French orchestral pieces conducted by their composers, recorded between 1930 and 1935, is surprisingly good: full, rounded, and free of interference. That makes it easier to enjoy and assess the composers' works and their performances as interpreters. Some of the music is justifiably obscure. Henri Tomasi's Tam-Tam, a 1931 symphonic poem for chorus, soloists, and orchestra is an interesting cultural relic, an exercise in musical primitivism in its depiction of life in ... Read More

The sound of Dutton's disc of early twentieth century French orchestral pieces conducted by their composers, recorded between 1930 and 1935, is surprisingly good: full, rounded, and free of interference. That makes it easier to enjoy and assess the composers' works and their performances as interpreters. Some of the music is justifiably obscure. Henri Tomasi's Tam-Tam, a 1931 symphonic poem for chorus, soloists, and orchestra is an interesting cultural relic, an exercise in musical primitivism in its depiction of life in colonial West Africa, with what would have been an astonishing amount of repetition for its era, but of material far less engaging than that of Boléro. Florent Schmitt's ballet La Tragédie de Salomé appeared just a few years after Strauss' opera. Musically it's far tamer (with a movement, "Les enchantments sur la mer," that's transparently a rip-off of Debussy's La Mer), but with a scenario that's more lurid, or at least more active: its final movement "is heralded by the storm... Read Less