![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
remedy de mer
Jan. 27th, 2008 03:21 pmOne 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.
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.
