[Long] Debussy, a Composer Unlike Any Before or After Him
Premise Checker
The only Debussy I really like is the chamber music. Quartet: Capet and
Violin Sonata: Dubois and Maas are outstanding. Piero Coppola almost makes
me like some of the orchestral music, though, and of course Mengelberg's
recording of the Faun Prelude is self-recommending. And I am coming to
like Reine Gianoli's Westminster LPs of Engravings and Preludes.
Acoustic Sets:
Children's Corner Suite. Cortot. 1923. Gram.DB 678/9A, with the Engulfed
Cathedral. Also in an orchestral arrangement, played by Francis Touche,
1919/20. French Gramophone.W 373 + P 380: K 2772/3
Petite Suite. Double Quintet de la Societe de Musique de Chambre pour
Instruments a Cordes et a Vent, cond. by Jean Lensen. 1911.
Gramophone.038012/5: 048021/4. Rerecorded by the same group, no conductor
identified. 1919. French Gram.W 311/2. These sets are extremely scarce,
and copies my no longer exist.
Quartet: The Spencer Dyke String Quartet. 1924. National Gramophonic
Society of London.D-f (4/6).
ditto. The Leo Abkov String Quartet. World.409B/10 [3 sides, complete!].
World Records were constant groove-speed discs that had to be played with
a special device, called a World Controller, that mounts on a normal disc
phonograph and would make the platter rotate slowing in the outer grooves
and increase in angular velocity as the needle went toward the center,
just like CDs, execpt that CDs play inside out. There were not the first
long-playing records, the honor going to the Neophone Company (England),
whose 10" discs played for twelve minutes at the then "standard" speed of
around 78 rpm.
All this from my
"Acoustic Chamber Music Sets (1899-1926): A Discography," _Journal of the
Association for Recorded Sound Collections_. I'll send an electronic copy,
in WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, to any researcher who would like to get it,
provided that no further dissemination be made until 2002 May 29, a year
after the final third Part appeared in the _Journal_, at which time the
article goes into the public domain. The copy you'll be getting is what I
orginally sent to ARSC on 1999 April 23. There were some additions and
corrections to later Parts but nothing of tremendous significance. I'll
redo the whole article, and incorporate newly found modest errors, before
putting it up on a site.
And Claude Arnold (_The Orchestra on Record, 1896-1926. Greenwood
Press, 1997) lists a set of orchestral interludes from Pelleas et
Melisande, conducted by Piero Coppola, Orchestra Symphonique des Concerts
Pasdeloup. 1924. French Gram.P 520/2. I know nothing about any vocal sets,
as that is outside my area of speciality (and interest). Of course, there
are many single discs.
Frank Forman
NYT AUG 10, 2001
Debussy, a Composer Unlike Any Before or After Him
A CENTURY later, the originality of the music of Claude Debussy is
clear. But in an era when the likes of Mahler, Stravinsky and
Schoenberg were trumpeting their innovations, Debussy insinuated his,
wrapping them in the most sensuous of surfaces. Not surprisingly,
therefore, they tended to be undervalued by the larger public if not
by later composers.
Now that the seeming giants around him have receded into the more
measured perspective of history, Debussy stands tall among them,
seeming very much a composer for this time. Or so, at any rate, Leon
Botstein, the conductor and the founding artistic director of the Bard
Music Festival, seems to think.
Over the next two weekends, the festival, in its 12th outing at Bard
College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., is to explore "Debussy and His
World," with the usual mix of discussions, concerts and film
screenings. Although some critics find the Impressionist label
misleading as applied to Debussy, the place of paintings in his world
will loom large in those discussions.
"By cultivating a way of seeing, Debussy achieved a translucent,
suggestive and complex musical language of feeling whose novel
character may have derived from visual models," Mr. Botstein writes in
his contribution to the typically copious festival book, edited by
Jane F. Fulcher and published by Princeton University Press. Next
Friday, Robert Martin, a cellist and the co-artistic director of the
festival, presides over a daylong symposium, "Literature and Painting
in Fin-de-Siècle Paris."
In the spirit of the festivities, the classical music critics of The
New York Times decided to provide a backdrop of sorts by choosing
favorites from the Debussy recordings available (insofar as such a
thing can be determined in the market's current, chaotic state).
CD's range in price from $10 to $15 for one CD, $15 to $20 for a
two-CD set and $30 to $40 for three- and four-CD collections. (An
introduction appears on Page 1 of Weekend.)
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Anthony Tommasini
PIANO WORKS. Walter Gieseking, pianist (EMI Classics 5 65855 2; four
CD's).
STRING QUARTET. Emerson String Quartet (Deutsche Grammophon 445 509-2;
with Ravel's Quartet).
"LE MARTYRE DE ST. SÉBASTIEN." New York Philharmonic, conducted by
Leonard Bernstein (Sony Classical SMK 60596).
"PELLÉAS ET MÉLISANDE." George Shirley, Elisabeth Soderstrom, Donald
McIntyre; Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, conducted
by Pierre Boulez (Sony Classical SM3K 47265; three CD's).
"PELLÉAS ET MÉLISANDE." Richard Stilwell, Frederica von Stade, José
van Dam; Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Herbert von Karajan (EMI
Classics 5 67168 2; three CD's).
Debussy was arguably the most radical composer of the 20th century.
After almost 300 years of propulsive and rigorous Germanic music,
along came Debussy with his rhythmically stilled, harmonically
ambiguous works. Music was never the same.
Yet Debussy was also a product of his culture. This fact has led to
the idea that French performers steeped from birth in the national
sensibility for color and refinement have an advantage when performing
Debussy. Actually, French performers sometimes overemphasize Debussy's
Frenchness. Some important outsiders have been better at revealing
Debussy the radical, and making clear the non-French influences in his
music.
The great German-born pianist Walter Gieseking, for one. He did more
to bring Debussy's piano music to the larger public in the years after
World War II than any French musician. A four-disc set offers
Gieseking from the 1950's in the complete Debussy piano works. These
performances remain the standard against which all others are
measured. Gieseking's playing has luscious colorings and suppleness,
but also rippling clarity, structural coherence, rhythmic bite, when
called for, and a slightly cool expressivity that never allows the
music to seem cute, even in pieces like "Golliwogg's Cakewalk."
For similar reasons, I admire the Emerson String Quartet's 1986
recording of Debussy's String Quartet. These exciting American players
bring youthful energy and analytic precision to their account, as well
as unsentimental lyricism in the wistful slow movement.
There have been more restrained performances of "Le Martyre de St.
Sébastien" than Leonard Bernstein's with the New York Philharmonic
from 1962, but it's hard to resist the cinematic vitality of his
account. At its premiere in 1911, this dramatic work, with a text by
Gabriele d'Annunzio, combined orchestral and vocal music, spoken
dialogue, mime and dancing, and lasted five hours. It was a dismal
failure.
For his concert performance, Bernstein adapted the text himself,
apportioning roles to a narrator (the actor Fritz Weaver), the saint
(the actress Felicia Montealegre, who was Bernstein's wife) and a
roster of vocal soloists headed by the sweet- voiced soprano Adele
Addison. You can understand the appeal of the story to Bernstein, who
struggled with his sexuality: entranced by the beauty of the young
Christian convert Sebastian, the Roman emperor Diocletian makes
advances. Rebuffed, he orders Sebastian killed with arrows. Though the
actors are somewhat histrionic, Bernstein's account of the score is
pungent, shimmeringly beautiful and full of imagination.
Debussy's opera "Pelléas et Mélisande" is both one of the greatest
operas ever and a sort of anti-opera, which contravened accepted
notions of dramatic pacing and narrative definition. There are two
essential recordings. The landmark 1970 account by Pierre Boulez (yes,
a Frenchman, but also a modernist) reveals the opera's path-breaking
qualities. But I slightly prefer Herbert von Karajan's 1978 recording
with the Berlin Philharmonic, an American Pelléas (Richard Stilwell)
and Mélisande (Frederica von Stade, in her prime) and a Belgian Golaud
(the great José van Dam). Debussy had a love-hate attitude toward
Wagner. Listen to Karajan's spacious, serene and weighty performance,
and you will hear why "Pelléas" would have been impossible without
"Parsifal" as a model.
Bernard Holland
ORCHESTRAL WORKS. Cleveland Orchestra, conducted by Pierre Boulez
(Deutsche Grammophon 435 766- 2, 439 896-2).
STRING QUARTET. Emerson String Quartet (Deutsche Grammophon 445 509-2;
with Ravel's Quartet).
"PELLÉAS ET MÉLISANDE." Richard Stilwell, Frederica von Stade, José
van Dam; Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Herbert von Karajan (EMI
Classics 5 67168 2; three CD's).
"DANSE SACRÉE ET DANSE PROFANE." Vera Badings, harpist; Concertgebouw
Orchestra, conducted by Bernard Haitink (Philips 438 742-2; two CD's).
PIANO WORKS. Walter Gieseking, pianist (EMI Classics 5 65855 2; four
CD's).
One of the happy issues of Pierre Boulez's advancing years has been a
body of Debussy's music recorded with the Cleveland Orchestra for
Deutsche Grammophon. Mr. Boulez grasps the elegance and sensuousness
of sound (listen to his own recent compositions) but lets neither get
out of hand. Understood here are the meticulous workings and
mysterious organizing principles that make Debussy tower over his
reputation as an exotic. "Prélude à l'Après-Midi d'un Faune," as close
to perfection as any piece of music could be, and the undervalued
"Images" for orchestra occupy one release; "La Mer," "Nocturnes,"
"Jeux" and the Rhapsody for Clarinet (with Franklin Cohen) are on the
other.
Debussy's G minor String Quartet, umbilically connected to Ravel's in
F, features a slow movement of unassailable, heartbreaking dignity.
The Emerson String Quartet plays it with the right restraint and, yes,
with the Ravel attached.
For the opera "Pelléas et Mélisande," I fall back on Herbert von
Karajan with Richard Stillwell and Frederica von Stade. Karajan makes
little pretense about putting his orchestra ahead of his singers, but
there is a satisfying consistency here.
Elsewhere, I have searched the record bins of my local music store for
a brief, unsung Debussy masterpiece, the "Sacred and Profane Dances"
for harp and strings, but found it only in a catch-all reprint from
Philips, with Bernard Haitink and the Concertgebouw Orchestra. Music
writers throw around the word "haunting," and these two movements are
simply that.
The most satisfying recent recordings of the piano music are by Paul
Crossley for Sony, but these have evidently drifted out of print. So
many pianists, from Michelangeli to Paul Jacobs, have discerned the
presence of Liszt in the Préludes, "Images," Études and suites, yet
more often than not, they have confused liberality of spirit with
liberality of movement. Debussy's precise notation, his extreme care
with exact rhythmic values and tempo indications -- indeed, his hidden
controls over music that seems to float on air -- require a
scrupulosity of phrase closer to Mozart than to Scriabin. The fabled
Walter Gieseking LP recordings for Columbia and Angel have returned
complete in an EMI Classics set. Once praised and more recently
condemned for his pedal effects, Gieseking had a more important asset:
an almost Classical respect for musical sentence structure. Mr.
Crossley has it, too.
Allan Kozinn
ORCHESTRAL WORKS. Montreal Symphony, conducted by Charles Dutoit
(Decca 460 217-2; two CD's).
PRÉLUDES, BOOKS 1 AND 2. Paul Jacobs, pianist (Nonesuch 9 73031-2; two
CD's).
ÉTUDES (12), "SUITE BERGAM ASQUE." Garrick Ohlsson, pianist (Arabesque
Z6601).
STRING QUARTET. Juilliard String Quartet (Sony Classical SMK 62708;
with Haydn's "Frog" Quartet and Verdi's Quartet).
Listening to a stack of Debussy recordings is a refreshing reminder of
the breadth of this composer's expressive and descriptive style, and
the degree to which that style skirts the Impressionist label that is
normally slapped on it. Like all such labels, Impressionism is
shorthand, and it can be useful: it places the music in a historical
context and it concisely describes music that is awash in painterly
chromaticism and largely liberated from the strictures of Classical
form. Still, works like "La Mer" and "Prélude à l'Après-Midi d'un
Faune," often adduced as Impressionist masterpieces, can also be heard
in a different way. In place of the hazy pointillism of Impressionist
art, to which the music is often likened, one hears subtle gradations
of color and carefully considered textures that yield an almost
photographic clarity -- exactly the opposite of Impressionism as it is
usually understood.
Great recordings of those two works are plentiful, but for sweep,
orchestral heft and sheer sonic beauty, few recent performances match
those of Charles Dutoit and the Montreal Symphony. Mr. Dutoit has made
his way through most of Debussy's orchestral works over the last 15
years, and Decca's compilation offers a good overview of both the
Debussy canon and Mr. Dutoit's best work. His account of "La Mer" has
both the power and the shimmer to make this seascape sound
three-dimensional; and the Spanish rhythms and timbres in "Ibéria" are
especially vital. The set also offers the opportunity to become
acquainted with the lesser-known symphonic fragments from "Le Martyre
de St. Sébastien."
Paul Jacobs's recordings of the "Préludes" were prized for their
balance of soulfulness and Gallic coolness when they were released in
1978, and they have stood up remarkably well over the years. There are
times -- in "Les Sons et les Parfums Tournent Dans l'Air du Soir" or
"La Cathédrale Engloutie," for example -- when he evokes an almost
orchestral power, yet there is great delicacy in these readings as
well.
Garrick Ohlsson examines the more vigorous side of Debussy's piano
writing in his sparkling 1988 recording of the "Études" and fills out
the disc with a bright-hued, sensual reading of the "Suite Bergam
asque." And of the many accounts of the String Quartet to be found,
the Juilliard Quartet's 1970 recording emphasizes the work's nervous
energy and sharp edges but throws a warm light on its more ruminative
moments. The disc also gets points for its unconventional program:
Haydn and Verdi quartets instead of the usual Ravel.
Anne Midgette
"PELLÉAS ET MÉLISANDE." Jacques Jansen, Victoria de los Angeles,
Gérard Souzay; Orchestre National de la Radiodiffusion Française,
conducted by André Cluytens (Testament SBT 3051; three CD's).
"MÉLODIES." Elly Ameling, Mady Mesplé, Frederica von Stade, Gérard
Souzay; Dalton Baldwin, pianist (EMI Classics 64095; three CD's).
CHAMBER WORKS. Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (Delos DE 3167;
three CD's).
ÉTUDES (12). Mitsuko Uchida, pianist (Philips 422 412-2).
PRÉLUDES, BOOKS 1 AND 2. Walter Gieseking, pianist (EMI Classics 5
67262 2).
DEBUSSY was of no school, followed no dogma, had no successors. His
music is eminently his own. People label it Impressionist for its
clarity, its radiant light, its ephemeral snatches of melody; but
Debussy saw himself as a Symbolist, and his work also creates a
distinctive half dream world of its own through the use of rich color
and (musical) language: a world with the power to transform. By any
name, his influence permeated the music that followed him, from that
of Arnold Schoenberg to that of Pierre Boulez (whose Debussy
recordings capture better than any other the luminous clarity that
leads people to call Debussy an Impressionist in the first place).
"Pelléas et Mélisande" is the quintessential Symbolist opera, a
setting of a play by Maurice Maeterlinck. You could do a list devoted
simply to great "Pelléas" recordings, like the 1978 EMI set in which
Herbert von Karajan luxuriates in the sound of the Berlin
Philharmonic. But André Cluytens's 1956 document, mono though it is,
has two factors in its favor: it is idiomatically French, and you can
drink the voices. Anyone who thinks French singing is about small,
tight sounds needs to hear Gérard Souzay's breathtaking, enveloping
Golaud or Pierre Froumenty's Arkel or Jeannine Collard as a radiant
Geneviève.
Jacques Jansen, the Pelléas in Roger Désormière's classic (and first
complete) recording of the opera 15 years earlier, is a little rough
around the edges. But few can touch Victoria de los Angeles, the one
nonnative in the cast, as an unusual, idiosyncratic and sheerly
beautiful Mélisande; this was supposedly her favorite role, although
she never sang it onstage. Leading the French Radio Orchestra,
Cluytens creates an environment as dense and profound as Maeterlinck's
forest but with a kind of joyful lushness.
Being a vocal maven, I have to cite a recording of Debussy's songs,
and there are none around that I like better than the complete set of
"Mé lodies," with singers able to give the delicate filigree of the
text-settings their due: Mr. Souzay, again, joined by others,
including Elly Ameling and Frederica von Stade.
Another wonderful compendium is the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln
Center's set: a cornucopia of everything from a piano trio the
composer wrote when he was 17 and off tutoring the children of
Nadezhda von Meck (Tchaikovsky's patron) to the three glorious sonatas
from the end of his life. Recorded live over a four-year period, the
three discs are studded with wonderful moments, familiar (the Violin
Sonata, for example, in which Ani Kavafian and Anne- Marie McDermott
avoid gratuitous virtuosity in favor of a gentleness that does better
justice to the spirit of the music) as well as unusual (the "Première
Rapsodie" and "Petite Pièce" of 1910, given red-carpet treatment by
David Shifrin and André Watts).
A personal choice of best recordings doesn't necessarily do justice to
the full scope of the composer's work.
So this list egregiously neglects the orchestral repertory in favor of
two acknowledged classics: the Uchida Études and the Gieseking
Préludes. The Études, the composer's penultimate compositions, are
difficult, mercurial and defiantly outré, qualities Mitsuko Uchida
emphasizes in her fluid, translucent reading, which sounds (as it
should) like someone moving in a new and different atmosphere: music
for a new century, be it the 20th or the 21st. Walter Gieseking's
Préludes hardly need an introduction: widely held to be among the
great recordings of the 20th century, light of touch, deep in
understanding, they merit that questionable accolade "definitive."
Paul Griffiths
ORCHESTRAL WORKS. New Philharmonia Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra,
conducted by Pierre Boulez (Sony Classical SM2K 68327; two CD's).
ORCHESTRAL WORKS. New York Philharmonic, conducted by Leonard
Bernstein (Sony Classical SMK 47546).
PRÉLUDES, BOOKS 1 AND 2; PIANO WORKS. Youri Egorov, pianist (EMI
Classics for Pleasure 4805).
ÉTUDES (12). Mitsuko Uchida, pianist (Philips 422 412-2).
Debussy'S sea was the ocean inside his own head: always in movement
and therefore never predictable, passionate and thoughtful in equal
measure, treacherous. "La Mer," his portrait of the sea, expresses all
those qualities, and at the same time has them built into its
substance, so that it can change radically, depending on who is
throwing light on it.
Pierre Boulez's first commercial recording -- presented in a two-disc
set with other orchestral works -- comes from 1966, quite early in his
career as an orchestral conductor. At that time, it was widely praised
for its clarity and cool, but what most impresses now is the anger,
and after that the yearning and the sense of threat. Perhaps despite
himself, Mr. Boulez was discovering that with Debussy, as so often, an
exquisite sensibility goes along with a taste for violence and even
cruelty. The flickering musical images of the middle movement are
often luminous, but the conductor's characteristic rhythmic snap makes
them also tense and impulsive. A quarter-century later, Mr. Boulez
produced a new version (on Deutsche Grammophon) that is better played
and much better recorded, but without the zing.
Leonard Bernstein's recording of "La Mer" is close to Mr. Boulez's
chronologically -- it dates from 1961 -- but finds the water
temperature very different. The music and the music-making here are
dramatic, vivid, sensuous and thrilling. Where Mr. Boulez's expressive
effects tend to be momentary -- the quick flip that tugs on a nerve --
Mr. Bernstein's depend on accumulated drive and earned climax. Again
the album is filled with other Debussy pieces.
Youri Egorov's double album of the Préludes, with a few other items
tossed in, is a kind of miracle. Egorov is spectacularly dexterous,
colorful and weightless: there are pieces -- like the First Prélude,
"Danseuses de Delphes" -- that sound as if they were being created out
of light and air. In others, like "La Puerta del Vino," the sound is
rich and slithery. Still others -- "Brouillards," "Les Tierces
Alternées" -- have their harmonic strangeness fully brought out by the
stillness of the playing.
Another wonderful choice for this music -- Zoltan Kocsis's recording
-- was ridiculously deleted by Philips almost as soon as it had been
released, but the same company has at least held on to the treasure it
has in Mitsuko Uchida's version of the Études. Quite unlike Egorov's,
her piano sound is rich and full, though she finds in it the potential
for extraordinary virtuosity ("Pour les Huit Doigts") and for a poetry
of sudden change not so distant from Mr. Boulez's at the same age
("Pour les Quartes"). This is a recording that stays fresh and
exciting.
What else? It would be impossible to do without a version of "Pelléas
et Mélisande." But which? In the case of the composer's second-largest
work, the score he wrote for D'Annunzio's religious-erotic pageant "Le
Martyre de St. Sébastien," the choice is clearer -- or would be, if
Charles Munch's old RCA account, which so well breathes with the
music, searing and uncanny, were reissued.
James R. Oestreich
"LA MER." Boston Symphony, conducted by Charles Munch (RCA Victor
09026-61500-2; with Saint-Saëns's Symphony No. 3 and Ibert's
"Escales").
ORCHESTRAL WORKS. Cleveland Orchestra, conducted by Pierre Boulez
(Deutsche Grammophon 435 766- 2, 439 896-2).
PRÉLUDES, BOOKS 1 AND 2. Krystian Zimerman, pianist (Deutsche
Grammophon 435 773-2; two CD's).
CHAMBER WORKS. Sigiswald, Veronica, Sara, Wieland, Barthold and Piet
Kuijken, instrumentalists; Sophie Hallynck, harpist (Arcana A 303).
ARRANGEMENTS FOR TWO PIANOS. Daniel Blumenthal and Robert Groslot,
pianists (Marco Polo 8.223378).
As pleasant as it is to celebrate recent Debussy successes, it is hard
not to lament the neglect of past masters in a desultory CD market.
Roger Désormière's recording of "La Mer" runs like a leitmotif through
"Sviatoslav Richter: Notebooks and Conversations," a book just
published by Bruno Monsaingeon. Richter, newly revealed as a record
reviewer, and a trenchant one, calls that recording "the most
beautiful in the whole history of the gramophone." Yet Americans will
find Désormière listed in the latest Schwann Artist catalog (despite
false clues) only for two discs of Tchaikovsky ballet music.
Pierre Monteux and Charles Munch are sadly underrepresented. Or
dubiously represented: Monteux appears briefly in "Debussy for
Daydreaming," from Philips; Munch, in "Debussy for Relaxation," from
RCA. (As for "Tune Your Brain With Debussy," who can tell? Deutsche
Grammophon, with what little pride it can still muster, seems too
embarrassed by the pandering to list the contents on the outer
packaging.)
Munch's 1956 recording of "La Mer" harks back to a time when American
orchestras retained great individuality and the Boston Symphony,
shaped by Monteux and Munch as well as Serge Koussevitzky, could seem
a superb French instrument. Given the pointedness of expression, the
overall suavity and reticence only enhanced the power when it was
finally unleashed.
The Cleveland Orchestra today brings its own elegance, refinement and
incisiveness to bear without reference to nationality, and Pierre
Boulez supplies the appropriate accent for Debussy. Whatever energy
may have been lost from Mr. Boulez's Sony recordings of these works
with the Cleveland Orchestra and the New Philharmonia in the 1960's is
paid back in mystery and sheer gorgeousness of sound.
It takes reminding that an ensemble as seamless as Cleveland's in the
later recordings is made up of individuals. Joshua Smith, the flutist
in the "Prélude à l'Après-Midi d'un Faune," provides it eloquently, as
does Franklin Cohen, the clarinetist in the "First Rhapsody."
Most of the positive characterizations above could be applied on a
different scale to Krystian Zimerman's version of the Préludes for
piano. Mr. Zimerman applies pedal coloration richly yet subtly, and
Deutsche Grammophon's recording lets a listener bathe in astringent
lingering dissonances and piquant ambiguous harmonies.
Since other favorite Debussy recordings -- Gieseking's piano works,
Uchida's Études, the Emerson's G minor Quartet, Karajan's "Pelléas et
Mélisande" -- are amply served elsewhere on this page, I conclude with
two novelties.
You had to know that the early- music movement, with its aesthetic of
period performance, would eventually catch up with Debussy. And here
it is: members of the Kuijken family of Belgium, who have labored long
and well in the early-music vineyards, provide stimulating accounts of
the String Quartet and the three late sonatas.
As so often, the value lies not in any period "authenticity," which is
always a chimera, but in opening the mind and the ear to new
possibilities of sound and interpretation. What's more, these are
excellent musicians, whose work would be treasurable in any case.
A disc of Debussy's two-piano arrangements of works by Gluck,
Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Saint-Saëns and Wagner, rather insistently
performed, is valuable especially for the "Flying Dutchman" Overture,
a vivid reminder of Debussy's ambivalent relationship to Wagner. How
could matters be otherwise between two figures of such historic
originality and indomitable force?
mrt
<< ORCHESTRAL WORKS. New Philharmonia Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra,
conducted by Pierre Boulez (Sony Classical SM2K 68327; two CD's).>>
Yes! This is an esssential set.
<<ORCHESTRAL WORKS. New York Philharmonic, conducted by Leonard
Bernstein (Sony Classical SMK 47546).>>
Never enjoyed Bernstein's way with Debussy.
<<PRÉLUDES, BOOKS 1 AND 2; PIANO WORKS. Youri Egorov, pianist (EMI
Classics for Pleasure 4805).>>
Yes, definitely.
<<ÉTUDES (12). Mitsuko Uchida, pianist (Philips 422 412-2).>>
Her best recording of anything. This one is very good. Not great, like
Jacobs's, but very good.
I don't understand the praise that several critics heap on the Emerson's
Debussy quartet. They leave me cold. I would choose the Guarneri, the
Berg, or the Juilliard over the Emerson.
Guys, let's do our own Debusssy list!
Regards,
MrT
mkperman
"mrt" <m...@norspam.duma> wrote in message
news:3B73FA...@norspam.duma...
> Paul Griffiths chooses:
>
> << ORCHESTRAL WORKS. New Philharmonia Orchestra, Cleveland
Orchestra,
> conducted by Pierre Boulez (Sony Classical SM2K 68327; two
CD's).>>
>
> Yes! This is an esssential set.
The midpriced remastered set has somewhat improved sound over the
original Odyssey CDs. Manuel Rosenthal on the French Ades label
is also essential.
The Gieseking EMI recordings are the overwhelming choice of the
Times writers. Yuck.
Marc Perman
Dr.Matt
>
>"mrt" <m...@norspam.duma> wrote in message
>news:3B73FA...@norspam.duma...
>> Paul Griffiths chooses:
>>
>> << ORCHESTRAL WORKS. New Philharmonia Orchestra, Cleveland
>Orchestra,
>> conducted by Pierre Boulez (Sony Classical SM2K 68327; two
>CD's).>>
>>
>> Yes! This is an esssential set.
Alas, we cannot hear Boulez performed by Debussy. That would be a real trip...
--
Matthew H. Fields http://www-personal.umich.edu/~fields
"Is there a mbira the house?"
Ray Hall
news:Pine.SOL.4.30.01081...@clark.net...
|Elsewhere, I have searched the record bins of my local music store for
|a brief, unsung Debussy masterpiece, the "Sacred and Profane Dances"
|for harp and strings, but found it only in a catch-all reprint from
|Philips, with Bernard Haitink and the Concertgebouw Orchestra. Music
|writers throw around the word "haunting," and these two movements are
|simply that.
The rest on this "catch-all" twofer isn't exactly chopped liver Debussy.
Haitink does excellent performances of La Mer, Images, Jeux, Nocturnes,
faune, Rhapsody for clarinet and orch, and the two dances you mention above
for harp and strings. Also included is van Beinum's Berceuse héroique. A
great Debussy compilation on a Philips Duo.
Another superb La Mer is Baudo's on EMI Eminence coupled with a briskish
Jeux, and faune.
For Iberia, then Reiner/CSO on an RCA Gold Seal shows off this orchestra to
great effect recorded over the span of 1956-57, in quite amazing sound for
it's vintage.
Regards,
# RMCR Contributor Links :
# http://www.users.bigpond.com/hallraylily/tassiedevil2.htm
# Main Page :
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Ray, Sydney
Alan Cooper
> <<PRÉLUDES, BOOKS 1 AND 2; PIANO WORKS. Youri Egorov, pianist (EMI
> Classics for Pleasure 4805).>>
>
> Yes, definitely.
Available for $8.79 + postage at
http://www.cybermusicsurplus.com/online_catalog.asp?sku_tag=CFP3CFPSD4805
AC