Nearly all of us when young, probably, nursed a passion for some film star or other. (Be honest—admit it!) That is considered quite normal and natural, but when a man of 67 (and, moreover, a composer of considerable repute) develops an obsession with a film actress, such a crush looks merely pathetic—the more so when his absorption in what he recognized as a ''monde irreal'' was only a form of escapism from material difficulties. Yet Koechlin's innocent infatuation with Lilian Harvey—in fact only the chief object of his adoration, for he was also fascinated by Ginger Rogers and Jean Harlow—drove him to write no fewer than 89 short piano pieces and two albums for flute, soprano, piano and ondes martenot (an instrument he employed in several of his works, including his Second Symphony) that contain music of great charm.
The first of these albums, and just the four flute items of the eight pieces comprising the second, appeared on the Hyperion disc listed above: now Philippe Racine and Daniel Cholette, who have already recorded Koechlin's Flute Sonata, go one better by presenting the two albums complete, bringing in for the purpose the ondes player Christine Simonin. Racine's tone is lighter and cooler (more 'French') than Fenwick Smith's rich sound, and Kathrin Graf (sister of the flautist Peter-Lukas Graf) has a less voluptuous voice than Jayne West, though equally well used. On the other hand, the new disc gains by Cholette's remarkably fine piano-playing: all his contributions are marked by an imaginative sense of colour and by finesse in nuances, from the mysteriously Satie-esque chord-sequences of ''La priere de l'homme'' and the calm tenderness of the ''Serenade a l'etoile errante'' to the vigour of the polytonal ''Joie de plein air'' or the trenchant brilliance of the atonal ''Jeux du clown''. The harmonic audacities of the two last pieces mentioned, and the strident, almost hysterical atonality of ''Pleurs'', stand in marked contrast to the dreamily graceful warmth and almost luminous quality of the rest of the albums: perhaps the most touching movement is the wistfully rapturous song addressed by Koechlin to his ''chimerique princesse'', Tout va bien. (Unlike Hyperion, Accord print no translation of the texts; and they also short-changes English readers by not translating an introductory essay by Michel Fleury.) One movement in the Second Album is for the wholly unprecedented combination of ondes and harpsichord—an extraordinary sweet-sour mixture of tone-colours whose other-worldly character perfectly illustrates its title of ''Sicilienne de reve''.
The monodies entitled Vers le soleil display the ondes' varied colours, their enormous range both of compass and of dynamics (parts of ''Les Sirenes'' are on the edge of sound) and, in a couple of instances, their quicksilver agility: their unearthly voice is fascinating. Stele funeraire is also a monody, an austere lament on three sizes of flute in succession.'