Cras: Journal de Bord; Âmes d’enfants; Légende; Piano Concerto; Danze; Paysages; Poèmes Intimes
Henri Demarquette, cello; Alain Jacquon, piano; Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg; Jean-François Antonioli, conductor.
Timpani 2C2037 (2 CDs); Timpani 1C1033. Format unspecified.—Who was Jean Cras? The question still deserves asking. A rear admiral in the French navy, born in Brest in 1879, dead there in 1932—a man whose musical output was necessarily constrained by the demands of a serious military career, yet who managed to produce work of genuine distinction, work that sits comfortably alongside the better-known Breton voices of his generation. Ropartz. Le Flem. The company he keeps is honorable.
These Timpani discs—three of them altogether, two orchestral, one piano—represent a sustained act of musical archaeology, and they reward the patient listener considerably.
Journal de Bord (1927) is the revelation. Written on board La Provence, it maps the three night watches at sea—8 to midnight, midnight to 4, 4 to 8—and the music genuinely smells of salt water. The opening watch has that particular quality of bronzed, massive wave-motion that makes you think immediately of La Mer, though Cras’s harmonic language is his own: less systematic than Debussy, more viscerally romantic, with brass writing that accumulates rather than simply announces. The middle movement is extraordinary—moonlight on water, but rendered without sentimentality, the orchestral texture thinned to something almost phosphorescent. And the finale simply moves, breezy and purposeful, a sailor’s pre-dawn confidence. Rich, efflorescent, and—this matters—genuinely original.
Âmes d’enfants (1918) is a trickier proposition. Dedicated to his three daughters, it aspires to capture childhood’s spiritual quality rather than its noise. The opening movement, “Pures,” achieves something memorable: a slow string meditation built on a theme that hovers at the edge of recognition—I kept thinking I knew it from somewhere, and couldn’t land it, which is either a flaw or a kind of charm. “Naïves” is lighter, almost a Sibelian musette. But it’s the finale, “Mystérieuses,” that lingers, its quiet obsessive repetition evoking a shimmering horizon with an economy Cras doesn’t always permit himself. The ending, which gathers itself for a fanfare, feels slightly premature—one wishes he’d trusted the trembling strings a little longer, let the thing dissolve rather than conclude. A Celtic temperament, perhaps: slow-fast-slow, just as Moeran and Delius arranged their violin concertos.
The Légende for cello and orchestra (1929) draws on the Breton legends of Le Goffic and Anatole le Braz without illustrating any particular story. Henri Demarquette plays it with authority and genuine warmth, finding the folk-inflected lyricism without making it quaint—which would be the death of the piece. There’s a warrior quality here, something unimpressionistic in its solidity, that reminds me strongly of Bax’s Phantasy for viola and orchestra. The aspiration toward evanescent beauty is present throughout; whether it’s fully achieved is another matter, but the attempt is serious and often moving.
The Piano Concerto (1931) is the most ambitious work here, and the most uneven. Alain Jacquon opens with grand flourishes—the piano and brass trading gestures in a way that’s almost Saint-Saëns in its confident display—and the finale has that light-tongued fanfare quality, touched with sea and pastoral dance. The central movement is where Cras is most himself: a darkly reflective nocturne, Celtic in its brooding introspection. But the work proceeds in what I can only call idea-blocks—sections that don’t quite argue with each other, that sit in sequence rather than dramatic relationship. Fauré’s Ballade is the right comparison point for the concerto’s spirit, if not its architecture.—The piano disc is something else entirely. Jacquon recorded these pieces at the Théâtre de Poissy in October 1995, and the sound is close and clean, which suits music of this intimacy.
Danze (1917) opens with “Danze morbida“—bell-toned, hypnotic, hovering near Satie’s Gymnopédies territory without being derivative. “Scherzosa” is glassily bright, the kind of writing that makes the piano sound like it’s thinking quickly. “Ténera” has a lovely singing line—it suggests Debussy’s “La fille aux cheveux de lin” while being entirely its own thing. And “Animata” closes the set with cut-glass clarity and a kind of uncomplicated morning joy that’s genuinely infectious.
Paysages gives us “Maritime” first—exotic bell-sounds, a gamelan-inflected shimmer that somehow also suggests Rachmaninoff, which shouldn’t work and does—and then “Terrestre,” a nervous, pit-pat movement that functions as a keyboard equivalent of Ravel’s string writing.
The Poèmes Intimes (spanning 1902–1911) are the most personal things here. “En Islande” is a sorrowing sea-song, not a shanty, genuinely mournful. The “Preludio” ticks quietly, Debussian in its restraint. “Au Fil de l’eau” releases a torrent of rapid-fire figuration—the same avalanche effect de Falla deploys in Nights in the Gardens of Spain. And “La Maison du Matin,” which closes the disc, achieves something timelessly magical at its center, a fugal grandeur touched with a modernity that’s hard to pin down precisely but impossible to dismiss.—Cras belongs with Aubert and Le Flem in that company of French composers who did serious work and then largely vanished from the catalog through no fault of their own. These Timpani recordings—Michel Fleury’s notes are exemplary throughout—make
