Claude Pascal – Sonatine for Saxophone and Piano – Georges Gourdet, Saxophone – France Clidat, piano – ORTF Broadcast – 1958
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The music of Claude Pascal this weekend. His Sonatine for Saxophone and Piano in this 1958 radio recital from ORTF in Paris featuring the legendary French Pianist France Clidat and member of the Marcel Mule Saxophone Quartet, Georges Gourdet.
Claude Pascal (born February 19, 1921 in Paris), is a French composer. After studying at the Paris Conservatoire, he obtained the 1945 Premier Prix de Rome for the cantata, La farce du contre Bandier. After a brief period as conductor of the Opéra-Comique, Pascal became professor at the Paris Conservatoire in 1952, a position he held until his retirement in 1987. From 1969 to 1979 he worked as a music critic for Le Figaro, and from 1983 to 1991 he was an expert on copyright issues at the Paris Court of Appeals.
In 1931 (then he was only 10 years old), he entered the Paris Conservatory of Music where he won the first prize for four times in 1937, 1940, 1942, and 1944. As a composer, he won the first prize of Prix de Rome in 1945 by his cantata ‘jokes of bootstrapping marchant’.
He was very active as a performer such that he was selected as a cast of Yniold in Debussy’s opera Pelleas and Melisande and appeared on the stage of the Champs d’Elysees opera house when he was only 12 years old, as well as he was appointed as a chorus master of the opera comic theatre of Paris in 1944-1945. In addition, he obtained a success as a educator such as becoming a professor in reed instruments at Paris conservatory in 1952, where he also became the head in 1966.
In 1948, at age 15, France Clidat played Henri Sauguet’s Concerto in A minor in Geneva under the conductor Ernest Ansermet. She studied at the Paris Conservatory with Lazare Lévy, Maurice Hewitt, Alexis Roland-Manuel, Norbert Dufourcq, and Robert Siohan and received first prize in piano in 1950, at the age of 18. She later studied with Emil Gilels and Lélia Gousseau.
At the Budapest International Competition in September 1956, she won the Franz Liszt Prize, a prize that had not been awarded since 1937. She later performed in many venues around the world. After a recital at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, Bernard Gavoty, reviewer for Le Figaro, dubbed her “Madame Liszt”. She was also called “the Ambassadress of the French piano”[7] and she was named alongside Monique Haas, Cécile Ousset, Robert Casadesus and Philippe Entremont as outstanding representatives of the French piano school.
Rather short piece, but moves along quickly – hit the play button and give it a sample.
