Florent Schmitt spent nearly nine decades on this earth, and the question of what to make of him has occupied French music lovers almost as long. He won the Prix de Rome in 1900, studied with Fauré and Massenet, knew everyone worth knowing — and yet something about his legacy remains perpetually unresolved, like a chord that cadences but never quite settles.
The piano duet music collected here spans roughly a decade, 1899 to 1904, which puts it squarely in the years when Schmitt was still finding his voice. And finding it, one should say, in rather distinguished company. Debussy was already deep into the harmonic revolution that would produce Pelléas et Mélisande. Ravel, younger by five years, was writing Miroirs — music of such precise strangeness that it seems to come from another planet entirely. Against that backdrop, Schmitt’s contributions feel like dispatches from a more comfortable address.
The Trois Rhapsodies, op. 53, for two pianos are the disc’s most substantial offering. Three movements, each with a national character — “Française,” “Polonaise,” “Viennoise” — and the last two haunted by waltz rhythms that arrive and depart with practiced ease. There’s real craft here. The voice-leading is clean, the textures luminous, and occasionally a harmonic sidestep produces a small, genuine surprise. But craft and imagination are not the same thing, and Schmitt too often settles for the former when the latter is what the music needs. The Cassadeus duo — Robert and Gaby — recorded this work in 1956, and I’d be curious to hear how their long experience with French repertoire colored the reading; they had, after all, a living tradition to draw from.
The Sept pièces, op. 15, written for piano four hands in 1899, are receiving their first disc here. That’s not nothing. World premieres matter even when the music is a hundred years late. And these pieces are genuinely pleasant — there’s a word that damns with perfect aim. They occupy the same harmonic world as early Debussy, circa 1890, before the master had fully shed his Conservatoire propriety. Chromatic inner voices, modal inflections, a certain dreamy reticence in the slow movements. One listens, and nods, and thinks of other things.
The Rhapsodie parisienne rounds out the program, brief and light on its feet. Six minutes of Parisian charm, which is to say six minutes of a composer doing what comes naturally when he doesn’t push himself.
The Invencia Piano Duo play with obvious care and no small amount of polish. Ensemble is tight, tone well-matched. But something is missing — call it risk, or interpretive hunger, or simply the sense that these players have a private argument to make on behalf of this music. The Trois Rhapsodies in particular want a certain bravado in the “Polonaise,” a slightly unhinged gleam in the waltz writing, and they don’t quite get it here. The playing is always reasonable and sometimes more than that. Reasonable, though, rarely makes a case.
Schmitt is not Debussy. He is not Ravel. The liner note’s claim to the contrary is the sort of well-meaning advocacy that actually hurts a composer by inviting a comparison no one can survive. What Schmitt is, or can be at his best, is a fluent, intelligent minor master — the kind of figure who enriches a tradition without defining it. This disc, four volumes promised in total, may eventually build a fuller picture. For now it suggests a composer worth knowing but not urgently.
