Bloch: Poèmes dAutomne and Psaumes – Delunsch, Sh

Somewhere in the middle of “Invocation” — the last of the Poèmes d’automne — the strings open into a sonority so plush, so unabashedly late-Romantic, that you forget entirely you are listening to a composer routinely filed under “Jewish nationalist” and left there to gather dust. That filing cabinet has done Bloch no favors. This disc, generous and beautifully prepared, argues that there was a whole imagination at work before Schelomo ever got written, one steeped in Debussy’s harmonic haze and Strauss’s orchestral heat and not remotely interested in announcing its ethnic credentials.

Bloch was twenty-four when he wrote Hiver-Printemps, and conducted its premiere himself in Paris in 1906 — a young man, Swiss by birth, restless by temperament, already circling the question that would occupy him for the rest of his life: what does it mean to write music from nowhere in particular? The two panels of this diptych don’t resolve that question so much as dissolve it into texture. Winter arrives in cold, spaced-out gestures, woodwinds answering each other across silence; Spring thaws by increments rather than announcement. David Shallon and the Luxembourg Philharmonic play it with unforced clarity — no attempt to inflate what is essentially chamber music wearing orchestral clothes. I’d have liked slightly more atmospheric murk in the string tremolos, a touch more Debussyan blur, but the woodwind solos are lovely, plaintive without whining.

The Poèmes d’automne is the real discovery here, and the reason to own this disc. Bloch composed the four songs during an affair with the poet Beatrix Rodes, whose verses — let’s be honest — do not repay close reading. “The flames are mounting toward the leaves aglow on the branch” is the kind of line that sounded better in 1906 than it does now. But Bloch’s music transcends the words almost embarrassingly, building climaxes of real sensual force, particularly in that last setting, where the orchestra swells into a Straussian glow that has nothing modest about it. Mireille Delunsch sings with tonal beauty and an evident emotional investment, though her French diction occasionally blurs under pressure — top notes sail out gorgeously, consonants go missing. No matter. The piece survives.

In the Night, tucked in among works from Bloch’s pre-war period, comes from 1922 — a wartime survivor, technically, though it doesn’t sound like one. Five minutes of hushed, private music, almost Fauré-like in its restraint. It’s a palm-sized miniature next to the surrounding canvases, and its brevity is a mercy; this is a disc that otherwise runs rich and thick, and a breather helps.

The two Psalms — settings of Psaume 22 and its companions — bring in Brigitte Balleys and Vincent Le Texier, and here Bloch’s biblical preoccupations surface more overtly, though even now the idiom owes less to synagogue cantillation than to French symbolist opera. Le Texier has the darker, more grained voice, and uses it with real dramatic sense; Balleys is warmer, rounder, occasionally a bit generalized in her phrasing where more specificity of word-color would help. Still, the performances convince.

Is there a version of any of this repertoire to compare against? Not really — that’s rather the point of Timpani’s enterprise, and it’s why the label deserves the loyalty of anyone who cares about the byways of French and francophone music around 1900–1910. Where Bloch is concerned, most listeners know Schelomo, maybe the Concerto grosso No. 1, maybe Baal Shem — Menuhin’s old recording still casts a long shadow. This is different Bloch: earlier, more saturated in the aesthetic ferment of pre-war Paris, less insistent on ethnic identity than the later works would become. Harry Halbreich’s notes rightly call him a composer who chose solitude as an aesthetic strategy, and you can hear that solitude taking shape here — not yet fully armored, still absorbing influences it will later shed.

Sonically the album is clean, warm, a bit reticent in the bass — the Conservatoire in Luxembourg gives a pleasant middle-distance perspective rather than an enveloping one. Shallon, who died not long after this recording was made, conducts with obvious sympathy and no interpretive ego; he lets the scores speak. That restraint serves Bloch’s early, still-searching voice better than a more interventionist hand might have.

Recommended, and not just for completists. This is a disc that quietly rewrites what you thought you knew about a composer everyone assumes they’ve already heard.