Koechlin: Complete Music for Saxophone

As an old man Charles Koechlin wrote: "One of the most dreadful diseases of our day is the desire to be modern", but he was no starchy conservative. Far from it, in fact - Koechlin counted among his friends virtually all the leading French musicians of his day, old and young, adventurous and less so, and acknowledged and even assimilated all the trends. He was a big fan of the burgeoning Hollywood film industry - witness the many works or movements named after popular actresses - and became president of the Popular Music Federation in France. He also wrote a fair bit for Adolphe Sax's recently-invented instrument, praising it in his academic writing as "a timbre that no other can replace". All such solo works in his corpus are brought together on this new bargain-priced triple CD from Brilliant Classics, one of a wave of recent releases featuring this most underrated of French composers' music. In fact, although this set has much to recommend it musically, it is not quite the b