Sarabande Op20 No2 (1919)

Jazz dans la nuit Op38 (1928)

Le bachelier de Salamanque Op20 No1 (1919)

There was no more fastidious composer of French song than Roussel. Not even Duparc, who was self-critical to a pathological fault, was as rigorous about purifying his style and excluding any kind of emotional or technical excess. Sarabande, the second of two settings of poems by René Chalupt written in 1919, might be uncharacteristic of Roussel in its eroticism but not in the restrained way in which that sensation is expressed, by the piano rather than the voice, and in the subtlety of its evocation of the post-Verlaine atmosphere of the poem. Jazz dans la nuit, composed nearly ten years later to faintly prurient words by René Dommange, evokes a quite different tradition - though not, since the jazz in the park is heard though the windows of the Schola Cantorum, very idiomatically. Once again the stylistic allusions are in the piano part with its jazz-band sounds and its cake-walk and ragtime rhythms. In Le bachelier de Salamanque, the second of the two 1919 settings of poems by René Chalupt, Roussel is characteristically discreet in his use of local colour. The influence of guitar figuration on the piano part is clear enough but its effect is ironic rather than atmospheric, its purpose being to offset the poignant if still restrained moment of pathos towards the end.