Claude Debussy
Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune
Ensemble Instrumental de Basse Normandie
Dominique Debart (Conductor)

This piece of music is loosely based on Stéphane Mallarmé's poem about  a young horse dreaming in sun.

A lot of people think that this piece, written in 1885, marks the beginning of modernism in music.

Debussy uses harmony, not so much to give direction to the piece but to evoke moods and emotions at specific points.

From the outset, the music is not really in any specific key. Because it never settles on one chord, the whole piece is imbued with a dream-like sense of drifting.

Quite revolutionary in its time, this piece doesn't even sound that modern now because the illustrative writing and evokative scoring has been borrowed by so much 20th century film music.

Whether this is "Impressionist" music or "Modernist" music is the source of some debate.

César Franck

Symphonic Variations for Piano and Orchestra
Philharmonia Orchestra

France Clidat (Piano)
Zdenek Macal (Conductor)

While Franck's music is very romantic in style, it still owes a great deal to its French heritage, being generally much less heavy in texture than German romantic music of the same period.

In a set of variations, all of the music is based upon the first theme. During the nineteenth century, this was a popular way of writing works for solo instruments. The orchestra can accompany in basically the same way all the way through while the soloist played more and more complex variations on original theme to show of their skill.

Maurice Ravel

Daphnis et Chloé
Grande Orchestre de Radio Tele Luxembourg
Jouis de Froment (Conductor)

Daphnis et Chloé

Sixteen years after Debussy wrote his famous Prelude, Ravel was asked to write the music for a new ballet being prepared by Ballet Russes in paris.

Ballet Ruses commissioned many of the great Ballets of the 20th century, including Stravinsky's ground-breaking Rite of Spring.

In the end, it took Ravel two years to write the music, and by then it was rather overdue. Ballet Russes only performed it for one season, and Ravel never really forgave them.

The piece did however survive in concert halls, where Ravel's two symphonic suites from the ballet are still widely performed, although the piece is feared by woodwind players the world over because it is so fiendishly hard.