Best From France

Don't believe the "Art and Music" tag on the top of this album's cover, for it suggests a much more ambitious effort to link the two expressive forms than is made here. There isn't much music here that Manet or his audiences would have listened to, although the overture to Offenbach's "La vie Parisienne" probably fills the bill. What Naxos has offered museum shop managers here is a random grab from its catalog of French music of the nineteenth century (Rossini by the time of the "Stabat Mater" being counted as a good Parisian). When Chopin wrote the "Waltz in G flat major, Op. 70/1," Manet was all of one year old. At the other end of the program, the movements from Debussy's string quartet and from the little-heard "Suite from L'attaque de moulin" (which provides a point in favor of giving the disc a try) overshoot his death by a good 10 years. Even Bizet and Chabrier, the composers who get the most attention here, weren't exactly bringing tunes to everyone's lips during Manet's heyday in the 1860s, although they had started on their paths to greatness. To do this album in a more rigorous way would have involved starting with the fact that the music in Manet's "world" would have been quite contemporary, would have been at least partly operatic, and would certainly not have been exclusively French. The link between music and visual art is a subtle question, and it's hard to blame Naxos for not really trying to answer it -- the performances on the album are entirely adequate and pure Naxos: competent and mostly a bit offbeat in one way or another. The buyer, however, should know ahead of time that there are no answers here, just a pleasant hour of French Romantic music, illustrated with some nice pictures by Edouard Manet.