Suite pastorale

Idylle (Idyll)

Danse villagoise (Village Dance)

Sous-bois (Undergrowth)

Scherzo-valse

Although he spent most of his life in Paris, Chabrier was a countryman at heart. He was born in the little town of Ambert in deepest Auvergne and, in spite of his Parisian education and nearly twenty years of service as a legal expert in the Ministère de l’Intérieur (the French equivalent of the Home Office), he never lost either his regional accent or his love of the countryside where he had been brought up. During the last ten years of his life he stayed for much of the time at his country retreat at La Membrolle, near Tours, which was less remote than Ambert but scarcely less rural.

The Suite pastorale consists of orchestral arrangements of four of a set of piano pieces, the Dix Pièces pittoresques, written in 1880, just as Chabrier was preparing to leave the Ministère de l’Intérieur to take up composition full-time. The tuning point had been a visit to Munich a few months earlier when he had seen Tristan und Isolde for the first time and had been so profoundly moved by the experience that he knew he had to devote the rest of his life to music. Even so, there is little trace of Wagner in the Pièces pittoresques and the Suite pastorale, which are essentially French. César Franck was heard to remark after the first performance of (a selection of) the piano pieces in 1881 that they linked his time with that of Couperin and Rameau; eighty years later, having observed momentous developments in the meantime, Francis Poulenc wrote that they were “as important for French music as Debussy’s Préludes.”

The comparison with Debussy was well made. Some of these pieces are clear anticipations of impressionism and - coming from a composer who had not been drilled by Conservatoire training - far ahead of their time. Idylle is not only a forebear of Fauré’s Pavane and Ravel’s Pavane pour une Infante défunte. It is also, and particularly in the orchestral version, a peculiarly painterly piece of work which presents its one theme, introduced by flute over pizzicato strings in the opening bars, in a variety of shapes and lights reflected in freely changing harmonic and instrumental colours. If Idylle is an expression of Chabrier’s affinity with the countryside - he once related it to a line from Victor Hugo, “I live in the fields, I love and I dream” - the Danse villageoise is a memory of his Auvergne childhood. It is a vigorous bourrée with outer sections in robustly rustic mode and a rather more graceful middle section.

Even more prophetic of impressionism than Idylle, and even closer to nature, Sous-bois rustles in the undergrowth of the lower strings throughout its outer sections while woodwind and horns and occasionally perscussion add dabs of colour to the consistently serene melodic material. The Scherzo-Valse title of the last piece suggests a more sophisticated dance movement than the Danse villageoise and, indeed, its teasing treatment of waltz rhythms in the middle section is exquisitely done. At the same time, under the brilliantly exuberant surface of the opening and closing scherzo sections, there is a pounding drone bass worthy of any village band.