I ended my
review of Hänssler’s first
Koechlin CD (La Course de printemps
and Le buisson ardent Hänssler
Classic CD 93.045) with the following
plea:-
Many Koechlin works
remain to be recorded. I hope that
someone will tackle some of these.
Conductors would do well to sift
through these ambitious orchestral
works: Vers La Voûte Etoilée
... Docteur Fabricius
and The Symphony of Hymns.
If only Holliger and the Stuttgart
radio orchestra could be persuaded
to record these works.
Here we are, more than
a year later with my Aladdin wish fulfilled
by Holliger and the Stuttgart orchestra.
If I had known it was this easy I would
I have asked for more!. In fact I will
end the present CD with some other Koechlin
requests and let’s see what happens.
Obviously Hänssler
and Holliger are supporters of Koechlin
and it is to be hoped that there will
be many more discs to come. In the present
case we get two mystical-philosophical
tone poems written in one case just
before the Second World War and in other
written during the war and the Occupation.
Vers La Voûte
Etoilée is the more compact
of the two works. Koechlin’s multitudinous
interests outside music included both
astronomy and photography. Flammarion
was an astronomer one of whose books
was decisive in initiating the composer’s
life-long absorption in the starry night
skies. Vers La Voûte Etoilée,
literally ‘Towards the starry vault’
(i.e. vault of heaven) can be variously
translated as Towards the starry
sky or perhaps more poetically Towards
the starry firmament. The composer
tells us that this represents a journey
to very distant places far from earth
yet still in touch with human emotions.
More a parallel with Holst’s Neptune
(from The Planets) than Holst’s
Betelgeuse (from the Humbert
Wolfe songs). It is a work of evanescent
romanticism with melodic lines constantly
shifting and refocusing as in Delius’s
Song of the High Hills. There
are some transiently Mahlerian moments
and others where there is a hint of
Rachmaninov’s Vocalise. It rises
to a peak of impassioned ‘angoisse’
and then languidly falls back into silence.
It is a work that was a decade in the
making and dates from an earlier era
than the other piece on this disc
The night sky and eternity
also lie at the heart of Docteur
Fabricius - an even more ambitious
piece in fifteen episodes one of which,
the longest at 8:58, is entitled Le
Ciel étoilée. It too
pursues a Whitmanesque agenda but across
a span of just over 5o minutes. The
narrative has the protagonist visiting
the philosopher Doctor Fabricius in
his isolated house high in the mountains.
He stays the night with the good doctor.
The doctor tells how he sees life as
an inhuman entity in which mankind is
used simply as a vehicle to continue
itself in return for which there is
no relief from pain or tragedy. He bids
his guest good-night. The guest alone
in his room gazes out from the high
tower upon the great unclouded expanse
of the star-studded night sky and is
convinced by the vista’s immensity and
silent beauty that life has a benevolent
harmony and order. When morning comes
he awakes in an inn and realises that
he has not yet seen the doctor. It was
all a dream: cynicism and idealism.
The music is highly
varied. In fact the note-writer claims
Koechlin as an early example of Polystylisticism.
Certainly the composer’s eclecticism
in evidence in Docteur Fabricius.
This contrasts with Vers la Voûte
where the heightened romantic-emotional
language is more homogeneous. The dour
and byzantine grandeur of the music
for Fabricius’s manor house (tr. 2)
is imposingly stern; having the gaunt
and Homeric tread found in the Hovhaness
symphonies. Much of the music before
the Chorale Aus tiefer noth is
atonal - a picture of the impassive
and inhumane chaos that Fabricius reveals
to the hapless and soon-downcast visitor.
The chorale (tr. 11) has a momentous
majesty - more regal and humane than
the Manoir movement (tr. 2). It prepares
the ground for the trembling strings
of the Le Ciel étoilé
- an extraordinary envisioning of the
night sky. The sensitive, tender
and meditative nature of this music
is enhanced by the ondes martenot, here
touchingly played by Christine Simonin
- who also played on the first Hänssler
Koechlin CD. The mood of wonder is comparable
with the music for solo violin in Finzi’s
Introit. Mind you, earlier in
the work Simonin adds to the fury of
the atonal maelstrom with notes suggesting
a hideous steam engine in agonised death
throes. All that is banished for this
utterly enthralling movement which is
followed by La Nature, la Vie, l’Espoir
where the mood is further nourished
and intensified. The ondes continues
its poignant vocalise having a yet more
prominent role. This is touching and
healing music - Ravel-like balm to a
war-torn world yet written during France’s
dark night of the soul. From this inwardness
a new confidence evolves and rises in
Réponse de l’Homme. This
is full of pastoral joy rather than
anything terribly grand. Strangely this
episode transiently recalls the finale
of Alan Bush’s Second Symphony. Peace
and prayer are regained in the Choral
final which will occasionally remind
you of Finzi especially in the string
music and perhaps of the peace found
in Vaughan Williams Fifth Symphony.
The premiere was given
in Brussels as a result of the untiring
championship of Paul Collaer of Belgian
Radio. Letters by Koechlin to Collaer
are helpfully excerpted in the booklet.
The first performance was given on 14
January 1949 by the Orchestre I.N.R.
de Bruxelles conducted by Franz André.
The composer had written out all the
orchestral material to make the performance
possible. Le Docteur Fabricius
has not been performed in public since
that date. There has been a radio performance.
I was alerted to the work’s strength
on 27 February 1997 by a broadcast on
BBC Radio 3 by Martyn Brabbins conducting
the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Later the
same week I also heard Vers La Voûte
Etoilée this time conducted
by Matthias Bamert.
It is a special pleasure
to welcome both these rewarding works
to the catalogue. They are of that rare
type that communicates immediately and
also reveals fresh attractions with
repeated hearings.
The present disc is
handsomely documented by Otfried Nies
of the Koechlin Archive in Kassel. Koechlin’s
letters are thoughtfully used to give
insights into the genesis of the two
works. There is also supportive biographical
material on both Flammarion (1842-1925)
and Dollfus (1827-1913). There are also
well reproduced photographs of Koechlin,
of Dollfus and one by Koechlin using
his favoured Verascope process.
I hope that Holliger
and his distinguished orchestra will
next record Koechlin’s five movement
Symphony of Hymns (1938: hymns to
the sun, night, day, youth, life), La
Cité nouvelle (1938, a fantasy
tone poem after H.G. Wells - perhaps
inspired by Things to Come -
Koechlin was a keen cinema-goer), the
First and Second Symphonies (1916, 1943-44),
En Mer, La Nuit (a tone poem
after Heine’s ‘North Sea’) and La
Forêt (1896-1907) a further
tone poem in two parts.
This is an important
disc and if that was the end of the
story you could ‘walk on by’; after
all, merely worthy music need not detain
us when there is so much to hear. Instead
these pieces represent real and deeply
rewarding discoveries requiring a little
persistence in the case of Fabricius
but instantly attractive in Vers
la Voûte Étoilée.
Rob Barnett
Christine Simonin (ondes martenot) 
