In 1907 Florent Schmitt composed music to accompany a ‘mimodrame’ danced by Loïe Fuller, La Tragédie de Salomé . His score is bursting with colour, energy and voluptuousness – and also with oriental influences stemming from his travels to Morocco and Constantinople, where he discovered the howling dervishes. The final scene features the heart-rending ‘Chant d’Aïça’, an oriental melody sung by a soprano. This music, though bold and modern for the listeners of 1907, nonetheless aroused the admiration of another composer, Igor Stravinsky, to whom Schmitt dedicated the Symphonic Suite he subsequently derived from the work. However, Alain Altinoglu, at the helm of the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra of which he has been Music Director since 2021, has chosen to record the original version of this landmark of early twentieth-century French music. The beautiful Chant élégiaque , in its 1911 version for cello and large orchestra, completes this programme.

This recording marks the beginning of the collaboration between the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra and its new music director, the French conductor Alain Altinoglu, who conducts the leading European and American orchestras and has made a reputation for himself in every repertory – not forgetting opera at Salzburg, Bayreuth, and La Monnaie in Brussels, where he is music director. Their first disc pays tribute to a composer whose bicentenary is celebrated in 2022, César Franck, with the famous Symphony in D minor and two less well-known works, presented in new editions: the symphonic poem Le Chasseur maudit (1882) and the large-scale symphonic interlude from the oratorio Rédemption, composed in 1872 after the Paris Commune, performed here in its first version, long considered lost.