Charles Koechlin, Pierre Boulez, Olivier Messiaen

condition (record/cover): NM / NM -  His Master's Voice publishes Les Bandar-log Op. 176 / Le Soleil Des Eaux / Chronochromie featuring Charles Koechlin, Pierre Boulez, and Olivier Messiaen in a program traversing three generations of French music. Koechlin, born 1867, represents late Romanticism; Boulez, born 1925, the triumphant avant-garde; Messiaen, born 1908, the bridge between worlds.

Koechlin's Les Bandar-log draws inspiration from Rudyard Kipling, those Jungle Book monkeys who kidnap Mowgli. Koechlin orchestrates their anarchy with late-Impressionist means, Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel filtered through wilder sensibility. Boulez's Le Soleil des Eaux derives from texts by René Char, resistance poetry translated into lyrical serialism. Messiaen's Chronochromie is "color of time," orchestral timbres painting duration itself.

The coexistence on a single LP of three such different composers says something about postwar French music: generations regarded each other with suspicion but shared records, concerts, institutions. His Master's Voice, EMI's British imprint, presents everything to an Anglophone public that perhaps didn't know Koechlin but had certainly heard of Boulez.