I have posted this recording some years back... maybe it is time to offer it once again.
When the world was young I went through LP after LP, never dreaming it would make it to CD.
One night I was browsing at a store (remember those?) and began to rifle
through an odds and ends bin....and there it was... just waiting for me...
astounded I did a happy dance.
When the house burns down I will grab THIS disc and the cats.
IF interested, do leave a lovely message here.
Just in case you have any doubts... well-
“HOW CAN YOU SING THAT AND NOT MELT?” the marvelous Elizabeth Brasseur exclaimed after a performance of PSAUME.
Of all the music Florent Schmitt composed, the Tragedy of Salome may be the most famous. But it’s the Psalm 47 that seems to amaze audiences most of all when it is performed. The reaction is one of delight — and surprise: “Why isn’t this piece better known?”
Composed in 1904 during Schmitt’s stay at the Villa Medici in Rome, the Psaume XLVII, Op. 38 is a comparatively early work, written when the composer was just 34 years old. When it burst on the Paris musical scene in its 1906 premiere, it left the music critics and audience members alike gasping for breath.
The poet and essayist Léon-Paul Fargue wrote, “A great crater of music is opening up in our midst.” And in a letter to Schmitt following the premiere, his friend and fellow-composer Maurice Ravel wrote, “My dear Schmitt, your Psalm is so profound and powerful, it nearly shattered the concert hall!”
The giant fresco painted by Schmitt in this psalm (“O clap your hands, all ye people”) is one that concert-goers in France hadn’t experienced in the realm of choral music since the days of Hector Berlioz’s Requiem and Te Deum a half-century before.
The forces employed by Schmitt in this 30-minute work – large chorus, soprano solo, large orchestra and organ – are overwhelming in their impact.
The contemporary American composer Kenneth Fuchs has noted the special position that Psaume XLVII holds in the French repertoire, writing:
“The Psalm is unusual for French music because it has such a big profile. Even Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloe, at its largest moments with chorus and orchestra at full throttle, doesn’t quite have the ‘hugeness’ of this piece. The Psalm’s language is not Germanic — but the dimensions somehow are.”
These sentiments are echoed by Walter Simmons, a musicologist and music critic for Fanfare magazine, who has written this about Psalm 47:
“… The piece begins and ends with tremendous vigor — an extravagant outburst of highly perfumed Franco-exoticism at its most virile, heroic and exalted … I can’t think of another piece that achieves — or even attempts — quite the impact made by this work.”
Despite the power of the music’s language, some listeners find that the middle section of the work, which features a soprano solo in an ecstatic recitation of the Song of Songs (“He hath chosen in his inheritance the beauty of Jacob, whom he loved …”) and accompanied by soft murmuring of the chorus and orchestra, is the emotional high-point of the piece.
The French music critic and fellow composer Emile Vuillermoz described the middle section of Schmitt’s Psalm in poetic terms:
“With sensual chromaticism which has lithe and languorous movements, we penetrate the perfumed chamber of the Shulamite, who gives utterance to her soft, dove-like cooings … in a contemplative reverie through which pass all the perfumes of the East.”
Not to leave it at that, Schmitt then takes us on an incredible journey in the final section of the Psaume, during which the chorus intones a paean to the Almighty (“God is gone up with a shout, the Lord with the sound of the trumpet …”), joined by the brass and organ, and culminating in a final explosion of sound as the orchestra whirls through the final pages of the score at once savage and joyous.
When he conducted the Psaume XLVII at the National Cathedral with the Cathedral Choral Society in the piece’s 2001 Washington, DC premiere performance, music director J. Reilly Lewis remarked to the audience, “I don’t think you will ever hear a more exciting ending in all of choral music.”
He isn’t exaggerating