Only a few releases of music by French composer Henri Sauguet (Henri-Pierre 
Poupard, 1901-89) have been reviewed in these pages. The most recent review 
(Jan/Feb 1995) was by Kurt Moses, who discussed Sauguet's piano music. Sauguet's 
wonderful Piano Concerto 1 (Chant du Monde 278330) and the delightful, masterly 
ballet Les Forains (EMI 63204) have unfortunately been deleted. So this release, 
recorded in 1994, is very welcome indeed!

From Bordeaux, where he was born and took lessons with Joseph Canteloube, 
Sauguet went to Paris in 1922, where he studied with Charles Koechlin and rubbed 
musical shoulders with Debussy, Honegger, Milhaud, Roussel, Satie, and 
Stravinsky--all formative influences on his own style. But Sauguet was 
stubbornly indifferent to musical fashion, stating "I feel neither behind nor in 
front; I advance only in the domain of my own music". With Roger Desormiere and 
others, Sauguet founded the Ecole d'Arcueil, named after the Paris suburb where 
Erik Satie had his lodgings. At that point Sauguet's father, alarmed that a 
Poupard was spending so much time among "bohemian" people, suggested that he 
change his name to Sauguet, his mother's family name. Sauguet's output includes 
15 ballets, five operas, four symphonies, concertos, chamber music, and music 
for stage and films. He scored his first success in 1927 with his ballet La 
Chatte, danced by Balanchine's company and produced by Diaghilev.

Sauguet followed Satie's teaching of "the great daring of simplicity", writing 
tonal, melodic, lucid, refined music with a romantic touch, spiced with moderate 
dissonance, often colored by Sauguet's optimism and happy disposition towards 
life. When critics accused him of not being serious enough, Sauguet countered 
that "music that makes you smile can be serious". Sauguet may well have been 
referring to the wonderful score of Les Forains, combining liveliness and 
sauciness with sentimentality, longing, melancholy, fantasy, freshness, and 
warmth. In such movements as the Prologue, 'The little girl on the chair', and 
'The Clown', Sauguet clearly took Satie's music-hall and circus music as his 
model.

True seriousness underlies Symphony 1, written in the war years and finished in 
1945. The symphony is dedicated to the memory of the innocent victims of wars, 
"those who...died without bearing arms". Sauguet wrote the work "to expiate the 
crime of having been a man alive in these appalling times...without having been 
able to do anything to prevent such brutal human idiocy". Its Andante is elegiac 
and lyrical, spanning melodic arches that lead to several passionate outbursts, 
its lovely main theme stated at the outset by a clarinet and put through a 
series of variations. The brutality of war is expressed in III.

This work has everything one wishes for in a symphony: delicate lyricism, 
soaring passion, dramatic intensity, rhythmic vitality, rich colors, and 
memorable melodies. It is long--each movement more than 10 minutes--but it is 
logically developed and gets more beautiful on each hearing. It is passionately 
played and well recorded here, with a few minor brass glitches. Please, Marco 
Polo, let's now have Symphonies 2-4, the three piano concertos, and the ballets! 

  --Diederik De Jong