The recent flurry of interest in Paul Dukas’s music – discs of orchestral music and the piano works – has inevitably revisited mostly familiar ground. The perfectionist composer, who is known to have destroyed a number of substantial pieces, only allowed 15 of his works, exquisitely polished, to be published. But he left unpublished a number of early scores, and the latest of Ediciones Singulares’s Prix de Rome collections has managed to delve farther into the beginnings of Dukas’s creative career, including what seem to be the first recordings of several of those pieces.
As with so many ambitious young French composers in the 19th century, Dukas made persistent attempts to win the Prix de Rome and the scholarship to spend a number of years at the Villa Medici in the Italian capital that went with it. He entered the competition every year between 1886 and 1889, but the nearest he came was in 1888, when he was placed second with his cantata Velléda (included here and also on François-Xavier Roth’s Dukas disc last year). Though he was among the favourites for the following year, no first prize was awarded and Dukas abandoned his efforts, ending his studies at the Paris Conservatoire, too.
The cantata he wrote for the 1889 competition, Sémélé, is the major curiosity here, performed for the first time, apparently, since it was heard at the competition. The scoring and the vocal writing are nimble and assured, but there are few hints of Dukas’s later mastery of orchestral colour, and formally the music obediently adheres to the rules of the competition. His idiom is closer to Massenet than Wagner, and sometimes even harks back, through Berlioz, as far as Gluck. Dukas’s smaller-scale pieces from earlier competitions are also included, and the second disc features better-known early pieces such as the overture Polyeucte and the horn-and‑orchestra Villanelle.
These orchestral and choral performances are much more than adequate, and Hervé Niquet brings out every textural point he can in Dukas’s scoring. Unfortunately the documentation accompanying the discs is not up to the usual high standard of the series. No detailed track information is provided, and it’s impossible to discover which singers take which roles in the cantatas – whether the silvery soprano who sings the title role in Sémélé is Marianne Fiset, Catherine Hunold or Chantal Santon-Jeffrey, for instance, or whether the feisty mezzo who is the vengeful Juno in the same work is Kate Aldrich or Marie Kalinine. A pity, but it’s an interesting pair of discs all the same.
