SEVERAC: Scenes of Southern France

Masó, Jordi

8.555855

hrough his relatively short career de Séverac stressed the importance of local inspiration as a means of preserving a form of music that was distinctively French. His songs include settings of texts in Catalan and in Provençal, and it was this region, between Marseilles and Barcelona, that drew his continuing interest and loyalty. His emphasis on the importance of regionalism, the subject of his Schola Cantorum thesis La centralisation et les petites chapelles en musique, was in accordance with the prevalent views at the Schola and to some extent with the policies of Action française and Charles Maurras, a patriotic campaigner for a strong hereditary monarchy that would allow significant regional autonomy. De Séverac retained his intense local loyalties and interests, but not his sympathy with the Schola. Attitudes of younger composers underwent some change, particularly after the scandal at the Conservatoire over the denial of the Prix de Rome to Ravel and the subsequent appointment of Gabriel Fauré as director, and de Séverac had more in common with Debussy and Ravel than with the perceived formalism of the Schola. He was greatly influenced by Isaac Albéniz, and completed Navarra, which Albéniz had left incomplete at his death in 1909, having earlier rejected it from his Iberia suite as descaradamente populachero (impudently vulgar).

CD

12.01.2004

747313585526