The strong aroma of Ravel and Debussy is understandable since Jongen had close associations with Parisian musical life. Clear glimpses of Holst and especially Bax appear through the swirling atmospheric mists of the Suite's ravishing ''Poeme elegiaque''—again understandable since Jongen was living in England at the time. What I completely fail to understand is why the works for viola and orchestra are virtually unknown. After all, the viola is pretty well starved of worthwhile concertante repertoire, and here are two works which are not only immediately appealing but of undoubted musical worth. True, the Suite's ''Final'' doesn't quite live up to the expectations of the ''Poeme elegiaque''—but that's such a wonderful movement it would be a hard act for any composer to follow. Therese-Marie Gilissen puts her all into this music summoning up a heart-wrenching pathos in the Suite's first movement and playing with real verve and vigour in the virtuosic Allegro appassionato. Orchestral support seems a little lacklustre, but that may be more the result of a flat, one-dimensional recording, and in any case this music is too good to be seriously marred by a recording of less than demonstration quality.
Jongen is known primarily to organists, many of whom will have come to know the Symphonie concertante through the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra's 1984 Telarc recording. Again, here is a work of real value which fills its symphonic mould with almost 40 minutes of well-crafted, inventive and original music. Recorded in 1975 but sounding through a sheen of hisses and crackles much, much older, the Koch disc cannot begin to compete on sound with Telarc's vivid recording. Neither can Rene Defossez achieve the kind of seamless fluency which is such a memorable feature of Edo de Waart's reading, while the Belgian orchestral players hardly match up to the sparkling standards of their American counterparts. But it's still not without its attractions; Hubert Schoonbroodt, despite being smothered by what sounds like a wall of plush velvet, seems to have almost as much fire in his soul as Michael Murray and the coupling with the two viola works is infinitely preferable to Murray's tame solos of Cesar Franck.'