I have been waiting for years for someone to record both volumes of Koechlin's Album de Lilian. The first, I knew, begins with a song in which he uses the advertising slogan for Palmolive soap (''Keep that schoolgirl complexion'') as a text for one of his chastely adoring and idealizing homages to the silent film star Lilian Harvey (silent in two senses: she ignored his letters and refused even to acknowledge any of the 93 works that he consecrated to his chimerique Princesse). That song turns out to be even better than I had hoped, both its poem, by Koechlin himself (''Palmolive soap is derived from palm oil and olive oil; one could use it on salad... better though to use it on the skin, on ladies' skin, to which it gives a velvetiness so marvellous that even the most demanding of lovers...'') and its innocently charming music, a hymn to beauty that is both earnest and very pretty.
How thoughtful of Fenwick Smith to have roped in a soprano (and a good one) as well as a pianist to give the nine numbers of Book 1 in their entirety. I suppose it would have been a bit unreasonable to expect him to engage a harpsichordist and an ondes martenot player to do the complete Book 2. He does include the four flute-and-piano numbers from it, though, so we have a pretty comprehensive mapping of Koechlin's gravely ecstatic obsession: two blissful waltz-songs, two bursts of almost atonal frustration, a hieratic hymn to Harvey's eyes, a sparkling snapshot of her as bathing beauty and a fantasy journey in search of her (by train, which flies through the air and crosses the Atlantic under water, arriving in the dream world of California to a heat-haze-distorted blare of The Star-spangled Banner) ending with a touching image of Koechlin waking from his dream: a still and lonely piccolo fading into silence.
Philippe Racine earns the Koechlin enthusiast's gratitude, too, for recording the exquisitely fresh and lyrical Primavera, Koechlin's expression of gratitude for the warmth of returning spring and his homage to the classical chamber music tradition. Both players include the serenely lucid Sonata (''for piano and flute'', as the title-page has it); I enjoyed Racine's coolly Gallic tone and athletic zest in the finale no less than Smith's more overt warmth and long line (though Racine, by a short head, has the better pianist), and both Claves and Hyperion know to a nicety how the flute should be balanced.
Smith (you will have gathered that I am not in the business of choosing between these two collections) makes his disc imperatively desirable by adding not only the 14 pieces of Op. 157/2 (the '2' signifies the piano-accompanied version, though they go very well also as solos; several of them are models of the art of writing a complete and satisfying piece of music that lasts under a minute) and the unpublished sight-reading exercise but also the beautiful Sonata for two flutes. Its opening and closing pages are archetypal Koechlin, poised and haunting, neo-classical in the sense that one would apply that word to late Braque.
The same name sprang to mind when listening to the two substantial Jolivet pieces with which Philippe Racine book-ends his Koechlin. An elusive talent (pupil of Varese, much-admired friend of Messiaen: you can hear both affinities, but he is not 'school of' either, really) and an awkward one: his music has a tough, even an aggressive quality that one hardly associates with the soft complaining flute; a jagged expressiveness and a way of obsessively circling a sort of 'home note' without ever confirming a home key. Interesting: I am glad to have encountered both pieces.'