Every time I hear something else by Charles Koechlin, I have to wonder whether Koechlin is the greatest of all modern French composers, not Debussy. He's just that good. He and Debussy are a kind of mirror image of one another - Debussy the minimalist who distills French musical energy to its essence, Koechlin the maximalist who catalogued every shade and color in a catalogue of music that one cannot finish listening to in anything less than years.
Koechlin is like a French Mahler - not because he has anything like Mahler's angst, but because he has Mahler's eclecticism and diversity of interests. According to wikipedia his great influences were "medieval music, The Jungle Book of Rudyard Kipling, Johann Sebastian Bach, film stars (especially Lilian Harvey and Ginger Rogers), traveling, stereoscopic photography and socialism."
This piece, 'Toward the starry vault', is one of the most beautiful, spiritual pieces you'll ever listen to, but it is a very Parisian sort of spirituality that clearly is too knowing for either religion or metaphysics. In this piece we feel that we are striving, ever closer and closer, toward outer space and its still infinite mysteries.
This stunningly profound Amuse-bouche should be opening concerts for every orchestra in the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctPTaigcRTE
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