The problem with Roussel is that he is at least as un-French as he is French. An audience vaguely expecting Ravel-but-different or not-quite-Debussy is as bound to be disappointed as a conductor who performs him that way is bound to fail. His harmonies are seldom sumptuous (though when they are they can be headily so), far more often they are pungent, as are his colours, which are rarely luscious. The skeleton of his music is often close to the surface, and it is sometimes hard to tell whether it is of bone or steel. Above all, and perhaps most difficult to accept, he is not obviously tuneful. His melodies do have real distinction and individually, but it is more difficult than with most composers to detach them from their context: the whole function of the brief but noble theme associated with Ariadne, for example, is to undergo transformation, as she herself is transformed from bereft and abducted princess to the consort of a God—the theme is not achieved at its first appearance, and its translated version needs the memory of its former self to acquire full stature. And finally there is Roussel's ferocious and, one might be tempted to say, quite un-Gallic energy, close at times to Prokofiev, once or twice to the more orgiastic pages of Richard Strauss.
So it should not seem too back-handed a compliment to say how admirably Pretre and his orchestra conceal their nationality—or rather how well they demonstrate that not all that is French is 'Gallic'. It is a performance of great vigour and excitement, of real anguished intensity at Ariadne's lonely awakening on the cliffs of Naxos, and of barbaric jubilance—truly Dionysian—in the music for Bacchus and his train. The sheer unexpectedness of Roussel's invention is given full value: the dazzling tangle of bright sounds for Bacchu's spell over Ariadne, for example—and there is no lack of grace or delicacy in her music. The playing is very fine—there is some particularly heroic whooping from the horns—and the recording is most satisfying in its breadth of dynamic and its undiluted presentation of colour.
The earlier, slighter, more ingratiatingly charmful score of Le festin d'araignee is no less well characterized with especially beautiful string playing and abundant fanciful delicacy.'