''Florent Schmitt was the last of the great family to which Ravel, Dukas and Roussel belonged. He remains one who, by a happy assimilation of Germanic or central-European influences, offers to the French school a call to a certain kind of grandeur.'' The tribute here is printed on the back of the booklet and was paid to Schmitt by Henri Dutilleux. However, although his bigger works are powerful (I am thinking of his ballet La tragedie de Salome and the choral-orchestral Psalm 47, both from his thirties), here we have chamber pieces from his large output that are unknown except to specialists.
On the evidence of this disc, they are probably worth knowing but not compulsive or revelatory. The Sonate libre is a violin sonata in two linked movements playing for 31 minutes; this is fervent and faintly exotic music of a kind that manages to recall Franck and, even more, Szymanowski, and Regis Pasquier and Huseyin Sermet convey some of its spirit without sounding altogether idiomatic in the way that we might expect if they had lived with it for years. It offers an abundance of striking gestures, yet is short of memorable melodies and, ultimately, the kind of substance needed to sustain a piece of this length. In this it is typical of Schmitt, a worthy composer of the third rank, but I admire the performers for encompassing its many notes.
The other music is more rewarding. The Three Rhapsodies are early pieces from Schmitt's Prix de Rome years, and aim to invoke in turn France Poland and Vienna. Although thick and complex m his usual way, they are fairly tuneful and played with panache by Sermet and that excellent pianist Kun Woo Paik; two-piano teams may find them worth investigating. The recording here was made in a different location from the other works and is good, but in the Sonate and the Hasards the sound is at times congested. This latter work, for piano quartet and in four sections, dates from 1943 and is lively and reasonably witty in spite of the composer's incurable tendency to lay textures with a trowel.'