Schmitt: Mirages, Ombres

Florent Schmitt's music is witnessing a modest revival. This Naxos disc is one amongst a spate of recent releases. I have known and liked Schmitt's Mirages op. 70 (1920) for a long while through a now discontinued recording by John Ogdon. So I started my survey of this recital with these two pieces. I was disappointed. Vincent Larderet's reading sounded so disjointed to me that I hardly recognised the music. In fact, with his rudderless plink-plonk in the tragique chevauchée this pianist really got on my nerves. A comparison with the Ogdon recording confirmed that these are two vastly different worlds. Ogdon's 'chase' really sounds diabolical, in the larger-than-life Lisztian tradition (Mazeppa). He pounds the keyboard with tremendous force, but also the quieter interlude and coda are wonderfully evocative. The first piece, Et Pan, au fond des blés lunaires, s'accouda, is cut from similar cloth. It mixes impressionist languor with Lisztian bravura flowering into a hauntingly beautiful, nocturnal postlude. In Ogdon's hands this is great music. In comparison, Larderet sounds too tentative, puny almost and without a sense of structure. Also there is an enormous difference in recording quality which is all the more remarkable as the Naxos recording was taped at Potton Hall, which is an excellent venue. The sound lacks body and, worse, sounds rather unclean. It is as if the mikes have been put too close to the piano strings and are picking up unwanted reverberation. Ogdon's 1972 recording, on the other hand, is fleshy, dynamic and very lively.

The Ombres, op. 64, is a more substantial piece in three movements, lasting almost half an hour. Here I have no reference point so I had to make do with Larderet only. At least there is a sense of shape, of coherence here so this pleased me a good deal more than his reading of the Mirages. And it doesn't seem as if the challenges are any less compared to the latter. Despite at first hearing sounding more reflective than the Mirages, the Ombres are formally complex, texturally opaque (written almost throughout on three staves) and harmonically adventurous. But given Larderet's debacle in the Mirages, I remain suspicious and wonder what this music might become in more capable hands?