Louis de Froment initially studied violin, flute and harmony at the Toulouse Conservatoire, before entering the Paris Conservatoire where his teachers included Louis Fourestier, Eugène Bigot and André Cluytens. He graduated in 1948 with the first prize for conducting and during the following year formed L’Orchestre du Club d’Essai de la Radiodiffusion Française, coming into contact with many young composers of the period. At the same time he founded his own chamber orchestra, and together with the flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal as soloist, toured Europe at its head. He served as musical director for the casinos of Cannes and Deauville until 1956, and of the Vichy between 1953 and 1969; conducted at the Opéra-Comique, Paris, and was chief conductor of the Chamber Orchestra of Radio Nice for the 1958–1959 season. Then de Froment took up the post for which he is best remembered, that of chief conductor of the Symphony Orchestra of Radio Luxembourg, and held this position until 1980, after which he became the orchestra’s principal guest conductor.

With regard to recording, de Froment’s career fell into two clear parts. The first included many recordings for the L’Oiseau-Lyre label on which he conducted the L’Oiseau-Lyre Orchestra Ensemble. The repertoire for this tranche of recordings consisted almost exclusively of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music, the increased representation of which was a marked feature of the record catalogues of the 1950s. Notable exceptions included Frank Martin’s Harpsichord Concerto with Isabelle Nef as soloist, and Jean Françaix’s Invocation à la volupté. The second tranche of de Froment’s recordings was made with the Radio Luxembourg Symphony Orchestra, predominantly for the Vox label: many of these discs were released on the subsidiary labels Turnabout and Candide. The repertoire for these recordings drew mainly upon French and German music of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Of note amongst these (at times qualitatively variable) recordings are the complete orchestral music of Debussy and all the works for piano and orchestra by Saint-Saëns, with Gabriel Tacchino as soloist. With the Luxembourg Radio Symphony Orchestra de Froment also made a number of miscellaneous recordings for various, usually minor, labels. He maintained his earlier commitment to contemporary music, recording Marcel Landowski’s Les Adiuex, of which he led the first performance in 1959, for La Guilde Internationale du Disque, and Charles Chayne’s Four Illustrations and Trumpet Concerto, with Maurice André, for Erato, also released in the USA on the Musical Heritage label.

© Naxos Rights International Ltd. — David Patmore (A–Z of Conductors, Naxos 8.558087–90).

A French composer as eccentric in his way of life as in his music, Satie exercised considerable influence over some of his more distinguished contemporaries, including Debussy, Ravel and Poulenc, particularly through his tendency towards extreme simplicity. A number of his compositions have become very familiar to many, largely through their use in other contexts.

Stage Works

Best known among the various stage works of Satie is his collaboration with Jean Cocteau, Parade, described as a ballet réaliste and first performed in Paris in 1917. This was followed by the ballet Mercure, a collaboration with Picasso that presents different aspects of the god, and the Dadaist ballet Relâche (‘Closure’), which served to alienate, by its perceived vulgarity, still more of his earlier supporters.

Piano Music

It is principally the piano pieces by Satie that have won popularity. Among these, many with characteristically eccentric titles, are the Gymnopédies, the Gnossiennes and the three Sarabandes.