Prague Chamber Orchestra - Jacques Loussier: Concerto Pour Violon Et Orchestre, Tableaux Vénetiens, Concerto Pour Trompette (1992) CD-Rip

Jacques Loussier, of course, moved on from ''Play Bach'' a long time ago, although the wider musical audience no doubt has little recollection of him away from that context. Yet the pianist always had a rigorous intellectual grasp of his musical ends and means, even when the average album by his group was capable of selling half a million copies. In a sense, Bach was never the focal point of his musical discourses, although the great man's music remained the bedrock of Loussier's questings.
This new collection of compositions by Loussier moves on from ''Pulsion'' works of the early 1980s, and places him, strangely enough, in a rather logical French compositional tradition. Certainly, in the Violin Concerto there are many pointers to Darius Milhaud's work of the 1920s, especially the jazz and ragtime-tinged ballets. This is a wholly positive connection, because both Loussier and Milhaud are so far removed from idiomatic jazz for it to be no more than an exotic colouring on the overall concept: elements of the rhythmic and harmonic language of the blues and early jazz are taken and applied to compositional structures and instrumental combinations whereby the expressive potential of the solo melodic line is enhanced, often through rhythmic displacement, without the work itself becoming a mere pastiche.
The Tableaux venetiens are for strings alone, and here there are strong affinities with the more agile works of Respighi, with a strong element of Stravinskian rhythm. Nothing startlingly new in all this, but an attractive work none the less which, had it been written by certain English gentlemen from the middle of this century, would doubtless be clasped to the patriotic bosom with an audible sigh.
The Trumpet Concerto is less convincing. Percussionist Arpino, so effective in the Violin Concerto, is absent here, and Touvron simply doesn't have the rhythmic bite and flair to keep a rather pedestrian score on its toes, so to speak. The solo part in itself is greatly more derivative than its counterpart in the former concerto, and the strings do little more than accompany. Rather too much like the inconclusive Third Stream experiments of the 1960s, I'm afraid. Still; the Violin Concerto is definitely worth at least one listen.'