The symphonic poem came of age with the dozen or so examples that Liszt completed in the 1850s. The genre soon split into nationalist schools – Czech works by Smetana and Dvořák, Russian by Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov, German by Strauss and Schoenberg – and Bru Zane’s two-disc compilation provides a potted history of the genre in France, from César Franck to Lili Boulanger. Some of the 15 works included are concert staples – Franck’s Le Chasseur Maudit, Paul Dukas’ L’Apprenti Sorcier, Emmanuel Chabrier’s España, Camille Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre – but many of the other composers represented here are forgotten now.
