Paris 1913: L'Offrande lyrique

The recording of Louis Durey's cycle "L'Offrande lyrique", with six songs based on texts by Rabindranath Tagore (the 1913 Nobel laureate in Literature) in the French translation by André Gide, is the highlight of this collection, which brings together works by well-known and lesser-known Parisian composers from the last pre-war year.

Musically inspired by the atonality of Arnold Schoenberg's "The Book of Hanging Gardens" and often referred to as the first piece of free twelve-tone technique in French music, "L'Offrande" vacillates between a clear and lively tonal language and dark, heavy, cloud-shrouded sounds. At times, the words seem to ponder over seemingly unrelated piano motifs before they come together, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes not, sometimes they follow the same path, then they wind their way separately from each other. That "Paris 1913" contains the premiere of such significant music, which was written over a century ago, places Durey on par with his contemporaries in the cafés and salons of pre-war Paris. Far from being overshadowed by the more well-known composers in this anthology, these songs bear witness to the strength of the French Mélodies of this era.