Max d’Ollone: Piano Quartet (1949); String Quartet (1898); Piano Trio (1920)
Patrice d’Ollone, piano; Quatuor Athenaeum Enesco
PIERRE VERANY PV799061 [69:03]
The French musical establishment has always had an awkward relationship with its own conservative traditions. We celebrate—endlessly—our radical innovators while consigning perfectly respectable craftsmen to oblivion. Max d’Ollone (1875-1959) represents exactly this sort of historical amnesia.
A Prix de Rome winner in 1897, pupil of Massenet, later professor at the Conservatoire — and director of various musical institutions, d’Ollone wrote operas that actually got performed between the wars. Yet for more than half a century, silence. This Pierre Verany disc won’t reverse that verdict entirely—d’Ollone isn’t a lost genius—but it makes a persuasive case that the neglect has been excessive.
The String Quartet dates from 1898, composed during his Roman sojourn, and it wears its Massenet inheritance lightly. There’s charm here, genuine melodic fluency, but also something more interesting: a structural confidence — that suggests d’Ollone had absorbed lessons from farther north than his teacher might have liked. The Brahmsian shadow looms—impossible to miss in the quartet’s developmental procedures—yet the harmonic language has that characteristically French chromaticism, closer to Franck than to anything Germanic.
The Quatuor Athenaeum Enesco plays with real conviction, their sound warm without turning soupy, their ensemble tight enough to clarify d’Ollone’s occasionally dense contrapuntal textures. By 1920 and the Piano Trio, d’Ollone had found his mature voice. This is cyclic form handled with complete assurance—themes transformed, recombined, but never mechanically.
The first two movements unfold with deceptive ease; nothing seems forced. Then the "Scherzo" arrives like a thunderclap, turbulent and — well — rhythmically adventurous, pushing at tonal boundaries without the hysteria that mars some French music of this period. D’Ollone knows exactly how far he can go.
The "finale" drives forward with real urgency, and here the execution catches fire—Patrice — d’Ollone (the composer’s grandson) plays with muscular authority, the strings match his intensity. The Piano Quartet from 1949 fascinates most. Written when d’Ollone was seventy-four, it sounds neither tired nor anachronistic.
Yes, it’s conservative—aggressively so, one might say, given the musical landscape of postwar Paris. But there’s something quietly defiant about its Brahmsian dotted rhythms, its unabashed lyricism. The composer refuses to apologize for writing tonal music with genuine melodic content.
In the slow movement, he achieves moments of genuine poignancy; the string playing here is exceptionally sensitive, vibrato carefully controlled, dynamic shading subtle. Throughout this recording, one hears a composer thinking contrapuntally, always aware of how his ideas develop and interact. The textures remain transparent even when four voices are going at once.
D’Ollone’s harmonic language occasionally approaches bitonality—there’s a passage in the Trio’s development section where two tonal centers seem to coexist—but he always pulls back, reestablishes clarity. Whether this represents caution or aesthetic conviction is hard to say. The 1999 release — made in the Salle des fêtes de l’Académie de Paris, captures the — performances with decent warmth, though the piano occasionally overwhelms in the quartet’s more vigorous passages.
The acoustic has that slightly dry French quality—not unpleasant, but lacking the bloom one might wish for in Romantic chamber music. So what to make of d’Ollone? He’s no Fauré, certainly no Debussy.
But he’s considerably more than a footnote. These are well-crafted works that repay attention, music that knows its own mind and speaks with clarity and conviction. The complete absence of pretension becomes, paradoxically, a kind of distinction.
In an era when so many composers were straining after originality, d’Ollone simply wrote what he heard—and wrote it well. Pierre Verany deserves credit for this excavation. One hopes other d’Ollone works might surface.
The songs, particularly, intrigue—nearly seventy of them, apparently. But even if this disc remains the sole representation of his chamber music in the catalog, it’s enough to suggest we’ve been too hasty in our dismissals. Not every composer needs to revolutionize music.
The subtle intake of breath before the pianist’s attack.
Some can simply enrich it.
