Roussel, Albert

Roussel, Albert – Quatrième Symphonie op. 53

b. Tourcoing, 5 April 1869 — d. Royan, 23 August 1937)

(1934)

I Lento (p. 1) – Allegro con brio (p. 4) – Meno allegro (p. 11) – Più allegro (p. 15) – Tempo primo (p. 19) – Meno allegro (p. 38) – Tempo primo (p. 41)
II Lento molto (p. 44) – Poco meno lento (p. 46) – Poco più mosso (p. 53) – Andante (p. 55) – Tempo primo (p. 57) – Poco meno lento (p. 59) – Tempo primo (p. 61)
III Allegro scherzando (p. 62)
IV Allegro molto (p. 91)

Preface
It was not until the late age of twenty-five that Albert Roussel, then an officer in the French navy, decided to pursue composition. He renounced the “invisible magnetism of the sea” that had taken him to the Far East aboard the gunship Styx, divested himself of his last compositional gaucheries, won not one but two composition prizes in 1897, and followed Vincent d’Indy to Paris and the Schola Cantorum, where he would teach counterpoint until 1914.

Though initially oriented on the style of the César Franck School, he soon, like most composers with something substantial to say, developed a uniquely personal voice. His first important works – the First Piano Trio, op. 2 (1902), followed by the oddly mystic aura of the symphonic prelude Résurrection, op. 4 (1903) – point in quite opposite directions. After a few symphonic sketches and piano pieces he then turned out four impressionist tone-poems depicting the seasons (1904-6). These he gathered together to create his “first symphony,” Poème de la forêt op. 7, premièred in Brussels on 22 March 1908. The Divertissement for wind quintet and piano, op. 6 (1906), with its lightness and brevity, speaks a quite different language – straitlaced, modernist, entertaining – that strikingly anticipates elements of Stravinsky. Here we already find, in embryo, the hallmarks of Roussel’s mature style: a self-contained dynamism in the figuration, often driving to absurd extremes the balance between principal and secondary material; a straightforward rhythmic propulsion that rubs against the grain; idiosyncratic tempo relations; and a general character of maverick elegance in which brittleness and sensuality, ecstasy and level-headedness, blend into a fascinating unity. …

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