Florent schmitt antoine et cleopatre

Today, no self-respecting orchestra would schedule a concert season without including at least one Mahler symphony on its roster. Yet today, the Korngold concerto rivals the Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, Beethoven and Lalo concerti in the number of concert performances it receives. In retrospect, successful transitions like these may seem only natural.

Antoine et Cléopâtre, Suite No.1, Opa (Schmitt, Florent) This work has been identified as being in the public domain in Canada and the United States.

That production was destined to have just six performances before disappearing from the stage. But Schmitt gave new life to the score by fashioning two suites out of the music. The suites were premiered in the concert hall in October , played by the Lamoureux Orchestra under the direction of Camille Chevillard. And then after that … near total silence for decades.

Other than an occasional broadcast performance of excerpts by the ORTF in Paris, the suites were never heard, much less recorded. The first inklings of a resurrection came about in when the French recording label Cybelia released the first-ever recording of the two suites — a Southwest German Radio co-production with musical forces conducted by Leif Segerstam.

On top of these factors, the Cybelia recording had extremely limited distribution beyond the borders of France, soon going out of print. And so another 20 years of silence elapsed. In North America, this manifested itself in the first-ever continental performances of the Suite No. Concurrently, the music finally received a recording on a label with true worldwide reach and penetration — NAXOS Classics — made by the Buffalo Philharmonic in The NAXOS recording has also garnered near-universal critical acclaim and a plethora of positive reviews — both for the performance quality and for the inventiveness of the music.

Shown below are several representative examples. Colin Anderson in The Classical Source :. It may disappoint, it might be a revelation ….