Symphonie Gaspésienne - Orchestre Symphonique de Laval
Symphonie Gaspésienne
Orchestre Symphonique de Laval
ATMA ACD2 2867 (atmaclassique.com/en/product/symphonie-gaspesienne-champagne-bartok-kodaly-prevost)
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Symphonie gaspésienne - Listen on Spotify
Suite de danses, Sz. 77: I. Moderato - Listen on Spotify
Célébration - Listen on Spotify
Read the Review
In February of this year I wrote briefly about an ATMA digital-only release of Symphonie Gaspésienne by Claude Champagne (1891-1965) featuring L’Orchestre symphonique de Laval under Alain Trudel. At that time I said “Although not much attention was given to him in English Canada, where his contemporaries included Healy Willan and Sir Ernest MacMillan, Champagne was an important figure in the annals of classical music in Quebec, where his students included Violet Archer, Roger Matton, Pierre Mercure, Serge Garant and Gilles Tremblay among other notables. I was very pleased to see a new recording of Champagne’s brilliant tone poem, composed in 1944. Starting eerily in near silence, Trudel leads his orchestra through the gradually building portrait of the fabled Gaspé peninsula with dramatic turns and climaxes along the 20-minute journey.” This recording has now been supplemented with works by Hungarians born a decade before Champagne, Béla Bartók’s Dance Suite Sz.77 (1923) and Zoltan Kodály’s Dances of Galánta (1933). The Bartók is not a suite of dances as we have come to expect from the baroque model; it draws on Hungarian, Romanian and Arabic rhythms and modes to create an “imagined folklore,” often dark and dramatic. In some ways it foreshadows his late works Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta and the Concerto for Orchestra. In contrast, Kodály’s one-movement work is much more tonal and based on actual tunes he heard performed by Roma bands while growing up in Galánta. The disc (ATMA ACD2 2867 atmaclassique.com/en/product/symphonie-gaspesienne-champagne-bartok-kodaly-prevost) concludes with Célébration (1966), a rousing and somewhat more abrasive work by modernist Quebec composer André Prevost (1934-2001), whose teachers included Jean Papineau-Couture, Clermont Pépin and Olivier Messiaen. As in the Champagne recording, the Laval orchestra rises to all the various challenges of these varied works and Trudel draws out resplendent performances from this fine 53-piece ensemble.