remedy de mer

[calimac]

One of the treats of my concert-reviewing gig is the excuse to get better acquainted with some works I've just never gotten around to before. Like Claude Debussy's La mer, which I'm reviewing tonight. Debussy has never been a favorite of mine (for French composers, I prefer Saint-Saëns and (very selectively) César Franck, so you can see where I'm going with this), and though I've heard La mer in concert before and have through happenstance acquired 3 CDs of it, it's not a work I had ever known my way around.

But I took a couple of those CDs along for the long drive of the past two days, and this morning sat down with them, and a score and a couple books on Debussy from the university library, and shut the door on the persistently interrupting cat, for a close study session. It's only 25 minutes long: I can listen to it three times through in an hour and a half. I'll still never love it: what the books describe as the main theme of the first movement (it's in the horns, over wave-like string figures, about two minutes in) seems to me entirely nugatory as a melody, and the theme which dominates the last movement irritates me with its descending chromatic line. But the goal of grasping the flow and structure of the work, and acquiring some appreciation of its felicities, I've reached. The ending of the first movement, with the dramatic return of a two-note rhythmic figure from the introduction (it's not a snap, because the first note is on the beat instead of off it), is genuinely exciting, especially in the recording by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Naturally I prefer a British orchestra.

And I'm struck with how much A Sea Symphony by Vaughan Williams owes to this predecessor in aquatic sound-painting, and how similar Debussy and Sibelius are in their cello parts - hard to say which came first here.

As for Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, the other work on the program, ever since I bought MTT and the San Francisco Symphony's fabulous recording of it, I haven't been able to get the "March to the Scaffold" out of my head.

Comments

[aradiva.livejournal.com]

I love the Berlioz, although I've never heard it live. I participated in a concert of the Berlioz Requiem, and that was the single loudest piece of music I can recall ever hearing (when all four brass ensembles and 16 tympani are playing at once). We studied both pieces in my first semester as a music major, many years ago.

[ellen-denham.livejournal.com]

I read this post yesterday before having to dash off to work with no time to reply, but the "March to the Scaffold" got stuck in my head too. It was one of the first pieces I owned on cassette tape and listened to over and over.

My dad had a pretty large collection of classical records, so I never bought any recordings of my own until I was in high school, at which point I would occasionally pick up a cassette in the bargain bin. The first two I bought were a recording of Debussy's Three Nocturnes and Ravel's Rapsodie Espagnole with Leopold Stokowski and the London Symphony, and a recording of the Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique. I can't recall the conductor or orchestra of that one. I know that early on I had another Debussy/Ravel tape with string quartets.

Debussy has always been a favorite of mine. Not so much for La Mer, though it is very atmospheric, but for his songs. Although in some cases I prefer a Fauré setting of the same text.