When a composer, especially a prolific one much of whose music has become popular, declares something to be his most important work, it is only reasonable to give it full consideration, even it is in a genre very different from the bulk of his output. Over and over again Jean Francaix has shown himself a writer of finely crafted, mostly light-hearted music; but in this “fantastic oratorio”, as he termed it, which he wrote, perhaps with a sense of the approaching catastrophe, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, he had to express dramatic depths of cosmic character. He employs all his resources of colour, calling among other things for two orchestras, the second of which, associated in the text with the hosts of Hell and the apocalyptic disasters, consists only of extreme high and low instruments plus a harmonium, saxophone, accordion and electric guitar (Francaix’s idea of Hell?); and he experiments by accompanying the words of Christ by timpani alone. There is one big coup de theatre when, after a blandly diatonic C major opening, a great burst of sound is unleashed at the vision of God’s throne; but it soon becomes evident that the work is scrappily constructed and that Francaix’s essentially small-scale and lightweight invention does not measure up to the enormous magnitude of his subject.
In this recording from a public performance the chorus’s words are so indistinct as to be mostly unintelligible even with the printed text before one; the soloists’ French is poor (words like “je” and “le” or even “la” emerging as “je” and “le”, and mistakes being made); of the soloists, only Eva Lind gives unalloyed pleasure.'