Among Roussel's more curious works is a brief Duo for bassoon and double bass composed in 1925—a sardonic musical joke—as a gesture of congratulation to the conductor and patron of music, Sergey Koussevitzky, on becoming a chevalier of the Légion d'honneur. Before he took the baton, Koussevitzky had been an internationally known double bass virtuoso. He promptly returned the favor by commissioning an orchestral work from Roussel, thus providing the occasion for the composition of the Suite in F, which occupied him from January to September 1926. There can be no doubt that, even without the commission, something very like the Suite in F would have eventuated. Compact of rhythmic spring and bitonal piquancy, its deceptively simple three-movement design—two vigorous outer movements flanking a prolonged moment of the most movingly exquisite poetry—had already been forecast in the Sérénade for flute, string trio, and harp, Op. 30, of the year before. In these works, Roussel leaves behind the last vestiges of Romanticism, his brief flirtation with Impressionism, and the foreboding stylistic experiment embodied in the postwar Symphony in B flat Major (1919-1921) to achieve his final, old-masterly manner. Titled Prélude, Sarabande, and Gigue, the suite's three movements seem to promise a faddishly Modern essay in neo-Classicism, after the manner of Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and their numerous followers. But Roussel's Classicism is of the eternally fashionable variety in its perfect cohesion of form, material, and intensely personal expression. Amid the stylistic melee of the 1920s, the Suite in F seems already to have answered the desideratum the Spanish philosopher, Ortega y Gasset, was to make in 1932: "In the hour of danger, life throws off all inessentials, all excrescences, all its adipose tissue, and tries to strip itself to pure nerve, pure muscle." The concentrated, rhythmically bounding, contrapuntally alive outer movements realize this athletic ideal with an ironic gaiety which Roussel's chronicler, Marc Pincherle, called "sportivité." The luminous Sarabande, on the other hand, tokens not merely repose but engagement—rising to an impassioned climax—with the enigma of life itself. The Suite in F was given its premiere in Boston, on January 21, 1927, with Koussevitzky conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Its European premiere followed on May 21, 1927, at a Koussevitzky à Paris concert.

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