Durand-Salabert-Eschig-Musique Francaise

In 1929, Olivier Messiaen finished composing his Préludes. The first original work for piano of a twenty-one-year-old composer, it would be the first to be included in his official catalogue. This col...

Le Carnaval des animaux was conceived in a small Austrian village, while Camille Saint-Saëns was working on his 3rd Symphony with organ, opus 78. Afraid that this humoristic fantasy could cause his oe...

Towards the end of his activity, Saint-Saëns came to prefer more streamlined sonorities, more subtle and refined textures, and became very interested in the sound of the harp. In 1893, he composed Fan...

A great-grandson of the painter Constant Dutilleux, a close friend of Eugène Delacroix, a grandson of the composer Julien Koszul and a friend of Gabriel Fauré, Henri Dutilleux (1916–2013) was immersed...

The Danse macabre is the third symphonic poem in orchestral version composed by Saint- Saëns in early 1875. It is based upon a poem by Henri Cazalis (1840–1909), the doctor and Symbolist poet who, at...

Le Tombeau de Couperin was composed by Ravel in 1918 to honour the memory of his friends who died during the Great War. It was composed in the style of Couperin, in the wake of the rediscovery of the...

Claude Arrieu (1903–1990) forged a singular style that broke free from the aesthetic trends she witnessed flourish throughout the 20th century. At the same time, she paid a great deal of attention to...

Le Carnaval des animaux was conceived in a small Austrian village, while Camille Saint-Saëns was working on his 3rd Symphony with organ, opus 78. Afraid that this humoristic fantasy could cause his oe...

The Danse macabre is the third symphonic poem in orchestral version composed by Saint-Saens in early 1875. Six months after finishing the orchestral score, the composer completed the two-piano transcr...

Ravel discovered in Aloysius Bertrand’s compilation of poems Gaspard de la nuit (1842) a world of shadows, irony, and imagination that spoke directly to his own artistic sensibility. From these poetic...

Jean Françaix (1912–1997) was a French composer and pianist known for his joyful, expressive music. He gained early recognition, studying under Nadia Boulanger and Maurice Ravel, and quickly became a...

Composed of a "Prélude", a "Sarabande" and a "Gigue", the Sonatine (1950) makes reference to antique dance suites. The composer’s virtuosity, however, allows him to free himself elegantly from this ap...

Intrada: from the outset, the title of Arthur Honegger’s piece for trumpet and piano is programmatic. Composed in April 1947 for the Concours International d’Exécution Musicale de Genève [The Geneva I...

It was in 1947, two years after winning the celebrated Grand Prix de Rome, that the French composer Claude Pascal (1921–2017) composed the Sonatine for alto saxophone and piano, his first work for Ado...