Paul Ladmirault: Poèmes Symphoniques Colette Diard (piano), Orchestre de Bretagne / Stefan Sanderling Recorded Rennes, September — 2000 Label: Pierre Verany PV700021 [56:39] To open with the obvious—Paul Ladmirault is not a household name. Yet this French composer, straddling the fin de siècle and mid-century, produces music of elusive charm, a poetic strain that refuses the bombast of his contemporaries. This disc, gathering Poèmes Symphoniques such as En Forêt (1932), La Brière (1926), Brocéliande au Matin from his unfinished opera Myrrdhin — (1909), and the Valse Triste for piano and orchestra, offers a rare glimpse into a world where subtlety and restraint reign.
Ladmirault’s music is, in a sense, a soft rebellion against the stormier currents of early 20th-century French music. Listening to En Forêt, you feel an airy, almost walking pace, as if the orchestra were tiptoeing through a dappled wood at dawn. The horn calls here are precise but never brash, a gentle awakening rather than a clarion call—reminding one of the pastoral inclinations of Vaughan Williams or Moeran’s wistful evocations of landscape, but through a distinctly Gallic lens.
The textures, transparent and gem-like, owe something to Ravel’s influence, yet there is no trace of his virtuoso flamboyance here. Instead, the orchestration favors open spaces and delicate interplay, with woodwind figures that drift like mist rather than cut through it. La Brière, drawn from the 1926 film adaptation of Chateaubriand’s novel, provides a more earthbound, rustic counterpoint.
It’s robust without aggression. The rhythms of village dances—farandole and gigue—are evoked with a rustic stomp, but Ladmirault never lapses into mere folk pastiche. There’s a sincerity to the dance rhythms that feels authentic rather than academic, a connection to place and tradition.
The fourth movement, “Idyll dans le soir,” is particularly affecting—sedate, sentimental without cloying. The warmth of the string section here could melt steel, though it remains firmly in the realm of intimate, not operatic. One might say Ladmirault is the French Delius—or perhaps a lyrical Bax, to load the dice for English listeners—but it’s a perilous simplification.
He shares their love of atmosphere and — well — a languid, dreamlike pace, but Ladmirault’s harmonic language is less lush, more; demure, and his rhythmic pulse steadier, less given to the undercurrents of emotional upheaval that Bax, especially, so loved. There is no Stravinskian bite here; the music glides past that edge, choosing softness over jaggedness. The Valse Triste is a curious piece—more ballade than waltz, more gai than triste, as the title somewhat mischievously suggests.
You can almost hear the rosin dust settling on the strings.
The piano writing by Colette Diard is crystalline, light-fingered, a perfect foil to the ensemble’s shimmering textures. The interplay here is intimate; one senses the pianist almost cradling the orchestral lines, coaxing them along rather than asserting dominance. Brocéliande au Matin, the prelude to Act II of Myrrdhin, is one of the disc’s highlights for its dreamlike calm.
One wishes the opera itself, on which Ladmirault toiled for decades, might one day see the light of day—a tantalizing enigma given the scarcity of interpretation materials. This orchestral prelude is a delicate incantation, evoking the mythical forest of Breton legend with a hushed reverence. Stefan Sanderling’s conducting is, for the most part, lucid, allowing details to emerge without forcing them.
Yet there is a certain tentative quality, particularly noticeable in the brass section, which sometimes errs on the side of caution where one might prefer a bolder, more committed gesture. Listening to the crisp, galvanizing energy of Fricsay’s Galanta Dances recently reminded me just how much this music needs—nay, deserves—that kind of expressive abandon. Without it, the music risks floating untethered, exquisite but unassertive.
Still, the album itself is clear and well balanced—the strings breathe, the woodwinds gleam, and the piano’s touch registers with satisfying immediacy. It is a valuable document, one that restores Ladmirault’s gentle, unassuming voice to the catalogue. He may never have sought the grand gesture, but in this modesty lies his own kind of triumph.
In sum: a disc that rewards patient listening, offering a peaceful, poetic oasis amid the more tempestuous tides of early 20th-century French music. It’s a music of twilight and dawn, a whispered conversation with nature and memory. No, it will not shake your world with drama—but it will enfold you in its nuanced embrace, and that is no small thing.
