The third movement, Aux bords du fleuve sacré (On the Banks of the Sacred River), employs singers and a chorus. Each of the three soloists has their own song, to words by the music critic M. D. Calvocoressi, a good friend of Ravel's and a member of Roussel's social group. Calvocoressi tells us that he had translated parts of Kalidasa's works into short poems suitable for musical settings, and that some of these had already been used in minor works. He showed the remaining poems to Roussel:

"To my great delight, [Roussel] told me a few days later that they had given him the idea of using human voices in the finale of a symphonic triptych which he was composing. He selected three, of which he used two exactly as they stood. But he wished the third to keep to a certain rhythm throughout — the rhythm of a psalmody which he had heard a fakir singing — so that he rewrote it practically from end to end."

Roussel claimed that he wasn't trying to write Far Eastern music, but instead to translate the sensations he felt over there into ordinary musical language. Just how authentic, then, is Roussel's setting of the fakir's song? Decades later, musicologist Jann Pasler attempted to answer this question:

"When I played this section of Evocations for various Indian musicians... they found it totally lacking in Indian elements and remarked that the text is not at all what a fakir would have sung. However, in Benares, when I sang the tune myself after playing the recording, an eminent Indian music scholar as well as my two drivers instantly recognized it as the devotional music of fakirs. Roussel's recitative-like setting and the vibrato... on my recording had thrown them off.... Roussel's treatment of the tune nevertheless respects the way this tune was performed and would be performed even today."

There are interesting comparisons between the early Evocations and a work written 25 years later, the ballet Aeneas. Both works cross genre lines; a case could be made that both are either symphonies or oratorios. Both add choruses to what are predominantly orchestral works, with wordless choruses used in both. Both start with impressions of godlike figures in mysterious, mystical caves. The influences Roussel was following in the two works, however, are vastly different: Debussy and India in the one, classicism in the other. This parallels, perhaps, the difference in accessibility of the two pieces, with Evocations being more "beautiful" and easily appreciated than its younger sibling.

Evocations is one of Roussel's most important and engrossing early works. If you enjoy Debussy's La Mer or Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe or Roussel's own Le festin de l'araignée, you'll enjoy Evocations.

Here is Roussel's version of the fakir's melody (71K WAV file) that he heard sung with non-stop repetitions and variations by a holyman on the banks of the Ganges at sunset.

An interesting and individual expression in which the composer fights happily shy of Debussyish softness and impressionism. [Olin Downes]

Impressionist influence, already discernible in the orchestration of the First Symphony and in the delicate incidental music to Le marchand de sable qui passe, becomes strongly evident in the opulent scoring of Evocations for soloists, chorus and orchestra. Roussel was closer to Ravel than to Debussy at this stage, preferring clearly drawn lines and continuous rhythms to melodic and rhythmic flux. [Basil Deane]

Oriental backgrounds and elements of oriental music now became tools of his creative trade. The first work to reveal this new tendency was a symphonic triptych with chorus and solo voices, Evocations... which was an outstanding success [when first performed]. [Nicholas Slonimsky]