Following on from her well-regarded recording of Schmitt’s Antoine et Cléopâtre and Le palais hanté (Naxos 11/15), JoAnn Falletta now gives us four more of the composer’s richly scored orchestral works. The best known of these, La tragédie de Salomé, was originally composed as a ballet for chamber forces in 1907 before being recast a few years later as a concert work for full orchestra and optional female voices. There’s no shortage of recordings of the piece, including excellent versions by Jean Martinon and Yan Pascal Tortelier, but Falletta’s version communicates the atmosphere, luxuriousness and power of Schmitt’s score as well as any. Martinon’s performance has greater savagery and fire in the concluding ‘Danse de l’effroi’, but Falletta’s is more evocative and moving in the ‘Les enchantements sur la mer’ and the recording quality is significantly more refined. Indeed, Naxos’s engineering is slightly to be preferred even to Chandos’s recording for Tortelier, the wordless vocals in Part 2 in particular sounding warmer and more rapturous.

The single-movement Oriane et le Prince d’Amour Suite, another work derived from music for a ballet, was premiered at a concert in 1937 under Charles Munch, where it greatly impressed Olivier Messiaen. It’s a lavishly scored work with appealingly sinuous melodies and an exciting conclusion. Falletta also includes two works not previously recorded. The first, Musique sur l’eau, is a ravishing setting of a poem by the symbolist poet Albert Samain, composed for voice and piano in 1898 and subsequently orchestrated in 1913, and here given an eloquent performance by Susan Platts. The second is Schmitt’s orchestration for violin and orchestra of his 1918 Légende, a work originally composed for saxophone and piano. The solo part is performed by the Buffalo Philharmonic’s concertmaster Nikki Chooi with total conviction and assurance. Altogether a most desirable release.