It would not be altogether surprising if Messiaen's gigantic and subversive Turangalila had dealt the French symphony—a relatively delicate phenomenon, at least in comparison with its Austro-German counterpart—a decisively disabling blow. As far as the Boulez School of French Composition is concerned, it did just that. Others have thought differently, and it is probably Henri Dutilleux, eight years Messiaen's junior, who is most commonly thought of as having done most to preserve the genre.
Marcel Landowski (b. 1915, the year before Dutilleux) is not in quite the same class, but the seriousness with which he takes the symphonic principle is clear from this well-recorded, impressively played new disc. I'd judge him to be a worthy rather than inspired disciple of Honegger, his principal mentor, and as much (if not more) a post-romantic as a neo-classicist. Since these three symphonies date from 1949, 1965 and 1988 you get a good overview of his style. He's best in colourful, lively scherzos like the bustling, generally good-humoured finale of the two-movement Third Symphony. Here he seems to shake off the rather portentous manner and amorphous textures of those more extended, deliberately paced movements which tend to culminate in tormented chorales and in which his ethical and religious aspirations are to the fore. As the literary quotations he is inclined to attach to his symphonic movements confirm—for example, ''but slowly another fear arose, and this fear looked at him from inside'' (Symphony No. 1, finale)—Land- owski's faith is not the wholehearted Catholicism of a Messiaen. There are unanswerable questions, and even the finale of the Fourth Symphony, titled ''A Quest'' and having some galvanizing moments of apparent certainty, dies away in indecision. Landowski's penchant for dense harmony and multi-layered rhythmic polyphony doesn't always succeed in contradicting the impression that he would rather be writing something simpler, more straightforwardly tonal. But at their best these symphonies give you a revealing glimpse of the kind of contemporary French music we rarely hear—the kind Boulez wouldn't be seen dead conducting.'