condition (record/cover): NM / EX - Gatefold sleeve. Serge Nigg converted from Catholicism to Communism, from Olivier Messiaen's mysticism to René Leibowitz's twelve-tone discipline, then back again through various apostasies and reconversions. Jérôme Bosch-Symphonie / Le Chant Du Dépossédé on Le Chant Du Monde documents a composer whose ideological wanderings left their mark on every bar.
The Hieronymus Bosch Symphony takes the Netherlandish painter's visions as program, those triptychs crawling with demons and sinners that fascinated the surrealists. "Le Chant Du Dépossédé" shifts to dispossession, political theme dressed in musical language. Nigg's career traced French intellectual history's zigzags; his music registers those shocks and reversals. Le Chant Du Monde, the Communist-affiliated label, provided appropriate home for a composer whose leftism never entirely disappeared.