Joël-Marie Fauquet’s booklet note for this recording of Les Béatitudes (1879) is a model of its kind, as it does precisely what it should do: enlighten and persuade. Many years ago, I’d tried to find my way into César Franck’s two-hour-long oratorio but found it tough going. Fauquet’s advocacy inspired me to try again with open ears and an open heart.

It took Franck some 10 years to set Joséphine-Blanche Colomb’s adaptation of the eight doctrines from the Sermon on the Mount (plus a brief prologue). Each beatitude follows more or less the same formal conceit – earthly voices (soloists and/or choir) sing of the world’s evils and then Christ and heavenly voices offer spiritual relief and redemption. This time, with Fauquet’s assistance, I found myself very much engaged by the first three beatitudes. I enjoyed the prefiguring of the D minor Symphony (at 0'49") in the orchestral introduction to the Second Beatitude, for example, and I found it notable that Franck chose to set the first part of the Third (‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted’) as a kind of grim minuet. Could he possibly have known ‘Denn alles Fleisch, es ist wie Gras’ from Brahms’s A German Requiem, with its similar tread? Beyond these, though – and a lovely moment towards the end of the Third (at 15'03") that could have perhaps influenced Fauré’s Requiem – it’s all relentlessly, and sometimes even insipidly, pretty. Sure, there are some other striking moments, but they are fleeting. Assessing these eight Béatitudes, Debussy said ‘it’s always the same beautiful music’; he wasn’t wrong.

This recording was made in a pair of concerts marking the 2022 bicentenary of Franck’s birth. It’s a fervent performance, and conductor Gergely Madaras does his best to wring some drama from the score. But I’m not sure that drama is what the composer was after here. It’s more of a devotional experience, I think, and Helmuth Rilling captures that spirit on his 1990 studio recording. Rilling also has a stronger line-up of soloists, particularly Gilles Cachemaille, who brings an imposing beauty to the Voice of Christ, whereas Madaras’s David BiΩic´ sounds a little woolly. Rilling’s Stuttgart choir is also better blended and more attentive to details (particularly the dynamic markings) than the Hungarian National Choir. So if you want to approach a work that Franck’s disciples, at least, found to be essential, I’d start there.