Franck: Symphonic Variations / Piano Concerto No. 2

Description

César Franck (1822-1890)Symphonic Variations • Les Djinns • Piano Concerto No. 2 in B minor, Op. 11Belgian by birth, French by choice and of more remote possible German ancestry, César Franck was born in 1822 in the Walloon city of Liège. His musical gifts, obvious at an early age, were encouraged by his father, who saw the possibility of a career for his son as a virtuoso performer. Study at the Conservatoire in Liège and early concert performance, with compositions to match his father’s ambitions, was followed by a period of respite from concert activity in Paris, with lessons from Antonín Reicha in the techniques of composition and rigorous piano discipline from Pierre-Joseph-Guillaume Zimmermann. In 1837 he was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire, where he began to win some distinction, continuing his piano lessons with Zimmermann and studying the organ rather less effectively under François Benoist. The natural course for Franck would have been to enter for the important Prix de Rome, victory in which would have brought three years study in Rome. It was, however, in 1842, when such a triumph seemed to lie before him, that his father withdrew him from the Conservatoire, now seeking for his son once more a career as a performer, initially in Belgium again, where it was hoped to interest influential patrons. Two years later the Francks were back in Paris again. Franck’s failure to impress, either as a pianist or as a composer, brought in the following years the need to earn a living as a teacher. His marriage in 1848 to one of his pupils, Blanche Saillot Desmousseaux, the daughter of parents of importance in the Comédie Française, heirs to a long family theatrical tradition, brought a breach with his father. From now on he continued to earn a living by teaching and as an organist, at first at Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, where he had been married. In 1851 he moved to Saint-Jean-Saint-François-au-Marais, with its fine new Cavaillé-Coll organ and in 1858 he was appointed organist at Sainte-Clotilde, where Cavaillé-Coll installed a new instrument, generally regarded as the finest example of its kind. It was at Sainte-Clotilde over the following years that Franck built a reputation as an organist. In 1872, after a period in which he had won the loyalty and affection of a group of pupils, led by Duparc, and during which his music had been performed under the auspices of the Société Nationale de Musique, a body devoted to the promotion of Ars Gallica, he was appointed to the position of professor of organ at the Conservatoire. From the 1870s onwards Franck devoted himself to composition, influenced in particular by hearing, in 1874, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, which made a profound impression on him. At the Conservatoire he aroused some jealousy in his colleagues by attracting to his classes a group of young composers, among them Vince