It's August 15, and that means it's Jacques Ibert's birthday. He was born in 1890, and managed to avoid being typecast either as a follower of Ravel or a member of Les Six (which would have resulted in the less euphonious Les Sept). Each of his works has its own charms and displays his gift for airy and spacious orchestration. He doesn't swath his melodies in wool; they glide in linen.
Ibert's Escales used to be a staple of the orchestral repertoire, but seems to have fallen from favor. The postcards of a Frenchman's Mediterranean vacation stand in delightful equipoise to Respighi's bombastic nationalist paeans, and would go well on any summer concert series. His Divertissement, also for orchestra and drawn from music composed for a movie comedy, is exactly what it says it is, unlike Mozart's grand works bearing that same name. The send-up of Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream pokes his Gallic thumb in the eyes of all Germans, but my favorite part is the madcap finale, which sounds as if the Keystone Kops are chasing Charlie Chaplin down the Champs d'Elysées. There's also a jazzy Flute Concerto, which is well-represented on disc.
A second-tier French composer? Sure, but one who ensures that the bar for entrance to the first remains very high.