A disc for those who prize largely extinct orchestral styles and sounds. The very wobbly, watery French horn of old in its opening solo from this 1962 Daphnis makes such a strange sound that you might wonder if it is a horn at all (more a case of, as Beecham put it, “an antique drainage system”). But the distinctiveness of the wind timbres results from more than just the narrow-bore instruments. On occasions in this 1954 Psyche, just as you are delighting in string playing that might have come down from the skies, the bass clarinet wriggles from under a stone and has a stab at playing in the right key (I’m exaggerating, but you get the gist). French orchestral players from this era were never praised for their tendency to listen to each other, or to play very quietly. In Daphnis, this does confer upon the music the dubious benefit of an extraordinary clarity – you nearly always hear them, no matter how complex the orchestration. Enough said, except to point out that in a few places (for example, the playful early dances around Chloe and Daphnis, tracks 3-4) the notes of the strings’ phrases smear into one another and rhythmic co-ordination is awry.
Cluytens and his orchestra are at their best when both Franck’s and Ravel’s music is at its most passionate, producing white-hot intensity for the climaxes of “Psyche et Eros”, and rushing into, and playing out for, the embrace in the “Daybreak” sequence of Daphnis. Both recordings (Psyche is in mono) have a remarkable range of dynamics for their day, the Daphnis in this respect outshining the roughly contemporary Monteux (Decca, 9/96) and Munch (RCA, 3/94) recordings. The chorus is also ideally balanced, distant and present as the score directs. '