The
Bienvenue en France title of this album is sly in several ways. The program begins with the fairly rarely heard Oboe Sonata of
Saint-Saëns of 1921, and it gets more obscure from there. The music of
Pierre Sancan and
Thierry Pécou is not much heard outside of France, and the early Oboe Sonata of
Henri Dutilleux was disowned by the composer (an action that some oboists, fortunately, have had the good sense to ignore). The cheery mood the title might imply is undercut by the restlessness of the works by
Pécou and
Santan. This, however, is part of oboist
François Leleux's point. All of the music is rooted in the French neoclassic impulse, which
Saint-Saëns embodied before there was such a thing, and which still persists today. The music may be cheery or nervous, but it is marked by balance, harmonic facility, and a certain restraint that is often humorous. The
Saint-Saëns sonata is worth the listener's time all by itself: the composer, by then, was considered hopelessly conservative, but in the last year of his life, he wrote a slow movement with ad libitum introduction and conclusion, something few others were doing in 1921.
Leleux's performance, in this movement and through the entire sonata, picks up the music's gentle lyricism perfectly, and he and pianist
Emmanuel Strosser maintain a feeling of sparkling repartee throughout. The
welcome to France offered here is a welcome to a realm of music largely forgotten in a postwar world where nebulous Germanic concepts of abstract progress reigned, and it is most heartily appreciated.