ALEXANDRE DENÉRÉAZ (1875-1947): Au tombeau de Tut-Ankh-Amen, Le rêve, Scènes de la vie de cirque.

Description: It isn't often that something comes along completely unknown to us (how many of you know this composer?) like this Swiss resurrection! Denéréaz was a student of Draeseke but, after returning to Lausanne, his birthplace, at the age of 21, he spent the rest of his long life as organist there as well as professor of organ and theory at the conservatory (where Ernest Ansermet was one of his students). Produced less than three years after Howard Carter opened Tut's tomb (record time in those days of slow information travel), the Au tombeau (1925) is a 15-minute tone-poem of granitic seriousness with a soft center of almost hootchie-kootchie "orientalism". En rêve (1908) is a typical dreamscape of its type, seeming to careen toward nightmare at the end of its twelve minutes but the 23-minute set of symphonic variations hiding under the title "Scenes from Circus Life" is the guiltiest pleasure (wait 'til you hear the slippery, slimy and scaly "Snake Man" or the not-terribly-politically-correct "The Africans" and "African Dance") - opulently orchestrated in a mixture of Glazunov, Richard Strauss, Wagner and Rimsky-Korsakov. What can Gallo do for volume two? Volgograd Symphony Orchestra; Emmanuel Siffert.