San Diego Symphony Orchestra Yoav Talmi, Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra, Georges Rabol, Anthony Bramall - Art & Music: Cezanne - Music of His Time (2006)

The claims of the Naxos Art and Music series are modest ones; the series "presents the composers active during the lives of the leading painters and sculptors, setting a musical context to their work." For someone who lived a fairly long life, such as painter Paul Cézanne, that doesn't narrow things down much. What the listener gets on this disc is a half century of French music of various kinds from the Naxos catalog, some of it (Duparc, Chabrier, Debussy) certainly relevant to Cézanne's nature-worshipping yet geometrical art, and some of it (Louis Vierne) certainly less so. The booklet attempts to relate music and art only in the most general way, but its selection of color prints is generous (the only design irritant is the ugly set of all-caps composer names on the front cover). The program, even if unified only by French nationality, has attractive features, including the sensitive trio of Duparc songs by tenor Paul Groves and pianist Roger Vignoles, and the comparatively rare Piano Quartet in F minor, Op. 10, of Léon Boëllman, an interesting precursor to Satie (also represented on the disc) in its use of medievalisms. This release is proclaimed by Naxos as part of an "educational" subset of its catalog, and it is not quite that. It's worth a listen in the car on the way to the museum, though.