Albert Roussel - Résurrection, symphonic prelude for orchestra, Op. 4 (1903)

Описание: Albert Charles Paul Marie Roussel (5 April 1869 – 23 August 1937) was a French composer. He spent seven years as a midshipman, turned to music as an adult, and became one of the most prominent French composers of the interwar period. His early works were strongly influenced by the impressionism of Debussy and Ravel, while he later turned toward neoclassicism.''

Symphonic Prelude after Tolstoy "Résurrection," Op. 4 (1903)
Dedication: Edouard Brunel

Orchestre national du Capitole de Toulouse conducted by Michel Plassons

First Performance: 1904-05-17 in Paris: Nouveau Théâtre; Société nationale de musique
Alfred Cortot (conductor)

Description by Adrian Corleonis [-]
Though he published a number of short stories and polemical works in the interim, Resurrection was Leo Tolstoy's eagerly awaited first novel since Anna Karenina, and also his last. Though published in a heavily censored edition, its appearance in 1899 provoked tremendous controversy while outselling both Anna Karenina and War and Peace. The plot thread -- a nobleman's attempt to rescue a girl whom he has dishonored and driven into prostitution, and his pursuit of her to Siberia -- gathers a number of stories of crushing injustice, dehumanization, and barbaric prison conditions whose aggregate looms as an exposé and indictment. Roussel read it soon after Teodor de Wyzewa's heavily cut French translation became available in 1900. Even in this bowdlerized form it made a terrific impression and prompted Roussel's first orchestral work, a "symphonic prelude" eschewing the novel's narrative drift while delivering a sounding conspectus of its atmosphere. Résurrection's premiere on May 17, 1904, under the auspices of the Société Nationale de Musique, Alfred Cortot conducting, was met with critical disdain and, after a hearing in Pau, the work was not performed again during the composer's lifetime. Even so, bad press continued to dog the work. So sympathetic a critic as Norman Demuth, writing a decade after the composer's death, could deliver this crushing assessment: "Of Roussel's...'Résurrection'...there is little to say. Performance today would be almost painful since it combines the traditions of its period...with the background of the Schola and only now and again can we detect any promises of the future. True, it opens with a basis of rising fifths which were foreign to the Schola teachings and now and again there seem to be other signs of enterprise; but the whole feeling is tentative....There is little sign of individuality in the harmonies, and we are forced to regard the work solely in the light of its studentage. Had Roussel continued along these lines, he might well have developed into a 'respected' composer and no more." On the contrary, the effective menace of the opening -- forecasting that of Padmâvatî a decade later -- is compounded of semitonal clashes, harmonies at the ninth, and prominent use of the tritone. Demuth insists on Résurrection's debt to Franck and d'Indy, but what the unprejudiced listener is apt to hear are more premonitions of prime Roussel works to come, carried by a sure and gratifying command of the orchestra, worked to a moving peroration looming with the force of an epiphany.