The heady, smouldering atmosphere of Florent Schmitt’s La tragédie de Salomé is impressively caught here by the Montreal-based Orchestre Métropolitain and its principal conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Originally conceived as an hour-length ballet, La tragédie de Salomé was triggered by the Paris premiere of Richard Strauss’s opera in 1907 but based on a less graphic representation of Wilde’s play conceived by Robert d’Humières, man of letters and director of the Théâtre des Arts. Schmitt wrote the music and three years later cut it in half to make this symphonic poem. It is a taut piece but one with a broad dramatic sweep, in which Schmitt was able to exercise his interests in exotic music, expound his skills as an orchestrator and even pre-empt Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in writing music of rhythmic pungency and violence for the final “Danse de l’effroi”. All these facets come to light in this vivid but finely judged interpretation, one in which the orchestral palette is perceptively deployed and Schmitt’s evocations of oppressive stillness are as telling as his more frightening statements about Salome’s state of mind.

César Franck’s Symphony in D makes for an intelligent coupling, not merely because hints of its harmonic language carried over into Schmitt’s own vocabulary but chiefly because it presents drama of an abstract nature that contrasts markedly with Schmitt’s more theatrically based score. Nézet-Séguin has a strong grasp of the symphony’s structure, its ebb and flow of dynamics and pace, and its rich spectrum of orchestral colouring.