Landscape in the delicate F major
Pastorale was published ten years before the Great War. This is really a clavecin-style piece, but one of such formal polish that – not only in the blithe and lyrically decorated tranquillo outer sections, but even more in the curious pathos of the central span (unusually for Chaminade in the tonic minor) – it seems a not unworthy forerunner of certain movements in Ravel’s
Le tombeau de Couperin.
from notes by Calum MacDonald © 1994
