Claude Debussy
   Orchestral Works

* Nocturnes
* Premiere Rhapsodie for clarinet and orchestra
* Jeux, Poeme danse
* La Mer

Franklin Cohen (clarinet)
Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus/Pierre Boulez
DG 439896-2 70:58

Summary for the Busy Executive: Ravishing.

Debussy stands with Mussorgsky, Mahler, Reger, and Strauss among the
great progenitors of Modernism.  He differs from most of the others in
that he had no great interest, past relatively early work, in the classical
forms.  He took the Romantic idea of "organic form" from people like Chopin
and Schumann (he edited Chopin's piano music) to an extreme.  On the other
hand, classical forms lurk even in the deep levels of Strauss's tone poems.
To some extent, they touch Debussy's own Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune,
his first major orchestral work.  After that, however, they almost
disappear, replaced by essentially expanded songs and dances and by
"narratives." A work like "Feux d'artifice" fulfills Ives's notion of a
piece of music unfolding like a life.  Harmonies are so chromatic and so
strained in their relationships, they lose their progressive function and
become "colors." Schoenberg may have theoretically proclaimed the birth of
atonality, but he seldom got any further out than Debussy.  Indeed, Debussy
was the composer most performed at Schoenberg's private subscription
concerts.  Since classical forms depend on the establishment of key to
mark their major sections, Debussy often couldn't use them and had to
find something else.  Even in works with relatively strong tonal centers,
Debussy avoided the structural function of harmony with such devices as the
old church modes, non-Germanic folk music, and whole-tone scales.  He
doesn't modulate to new keys as much as he simply plunks down whatever new
tonal center he wants.

Recently, we've heard much talk about Debussy's music as non-Impressionist,
although of course the term was adapted from painting to describe the type
of music Debussy wrote.  Debussy himself cared neither for the term as
applied to his music nor for the painters of that school (his favorite
painter was Botticelli).  However, the critics who used the term weren't
necessarily fools.  One can find point in the analogy between the canvasses
of Impressionists and Postimpressionists and the music of Debussy.
Although one notes exceptions among individual painters, the interest of
Impressionism isn't primarily psychological.  One doesn't "read" the
surface to arrive at a metaphysical truth, truth of character, or dramatic
conflict.  Rather, the surface leads to pure sensation - often ecstasy in
the presence of the beautiful.  The impressionist usually says, without
Mahler's irony, "Wird's nicht eine schoene Welt?" The world is often
enough.  With the major sport of Pelleas and some of the late works to one
side, almost all of Debussy's music deals in the physical sensation of the
world and the shutting down of the brain overwhelmed by beauty.

A lot of music forgives a loose performance.  Horenstein's Mahler Eighth,
for example, has clams galore, but it matters less than his unsurpassed
ability to capture the rhetorical and architectural thrust of the work.
Debussy, however, constitutes a special case.  The texture and sonority is
indeed largely the point.  While much of Boulez's conducting strikes me as
literally superficial and led to some very disappointing Bartok with the
Chicago, in Debussy, Boulez's concern with surface becomes a benefit.

This CD is, I believe, the second album of Boulez's traversal through
Debussy's orchestral music with the Cleveland Orchestra, an organization
not heretofore known for its Debussy.  In fact, Szell's recording of La Mer
was generally known, even in Cleveland, as "Das Meer." At issue was the
clarity of subsidiary lines.  Playing Impressionist music thirty or forty
years ago meant a lush wash of orchestral sound.  Performances by Ansermet,
Ormandy, and Stokowski set the tonal image.  Yet it turns out that Szell's
approach was prophetic - a revolution I saw in my lifetime.  Boulez's
Debussy sounds m uch closer to Szell's than to Ansermet's.

The Nocturnes, if I had to choose, would probably rank as my favorite
Debussy orchestral piece.  In three movements - "Clouds," "Fetes," and
"Sirens" (the Odyssey kind) - the work is about new, beautiful harmonies
and sonorities.  From the bare opening of "Clouds" (winds in two parts) to
the Holstian fade-out of women's voices in "Sirens" (more than a decade
before Holst), Boulez and the Cleveland find the groove of the piece.  This
is playing so good, it's scary.  Cleveland's musical strength has always
been rhythmic precision.  Here, they manage to add such marvelous phrasing
that one hears long lines more than rhythms, although the rhythms lose none
of their sharpness.  If there's an orchestra finer than this one, I don't
know it.

The so-called First Rhapsody for clarinet (Debussy never wrote a Second)
Debussy originally wrote for clarinet and piano as a test piece for
students at the Paris Conservatoire.  This work differs from the "Petite
piece" (also for clarinet and piano and also written as a Conservatoire
test piece).  It's far longer and structurally more complex.  Debussy was
so pleased with it, he himself orchestrated it (a task he often left to
others).  Again, one has to hear the playing to believe it.  Franklin
Cohen, Cleveland's principal clarinet, puts out a rapturous line - smooth
and secure over the complete range of the instrument.  He is a master of
color and dynamics.  I've not heard anyone else with such a variety.  But
this isn't simply a technical exercise, beautifully done.  Cohen and the
orchestra capture the dreamy sensuousness and the ecstasy of the piece.

Debussy wrote his last orchestral work, Jeux (1913), as a ballet for
Nijinsky.  It's an odd work with an odd scenario.  To quote from the
original program note, after a fairly substantial prelude in which nothing
happens on stage,

   ... [a tennis] ball falls onto the stage; a young man in tennis kit,
   racket held high, bounds across. He disappears ... Then two girls
   come on, fearful and curious. They seem to be looking only for
   somewhere to exchange confidences. They start to dance, one after
   the other. Suddenly they stop, disconcerted by the noise of disturbed
   leaves. The young man is to be seen, his gaze following their movements
   from the branches.  They make to leave. But he brings them back
   tactfully and persuades one of them to dance with him; he even steals
   a kiss. The spite or jealousy of the other girl sets off an ironic,
   mocking dance ... and draws the attention of the young man: he invites
   her into a waltz. ... But the first girl, abandoned, makes to leave.
   The other restrains her ... with tender insistence, and the dance
   becomes a threesome ... growing more and more excited to a moment of
   ecstasy, interrupted by another falling lost tennis ball, which causes
   the three young people to flee; the chords of the prelude return; a
   few notes still slip by furtively, and it is all over.

To hear the music of this work alone, one would never guess the scenario.
The pre-War polite tennis party and flirtation take place to music as
passionately pagan as Ravel's Daphnis et Chloe.  Pan dances with nymphs,
all in tennis costume.  Just as in the works of Louys and other Decadents,
the classical world is seen as a sexually liberating force.  A late work,
Jeux's music speaks in the accents of the sphinx.  Much goes on "below the
surface." This is music of psychological ambiguity.  The surface has become
not an end in itself but, as in Henry James, a repository of hints and
clues to the emotional life of the principals.  Yet it is also music a
dancer would like to move to.

I've never understood the popularity of La Mer.  Yes, it's a masterpiece,
but it's full of such quirks - no great tunes, no sustained dancing, and
many sudden shifts of idea - all things that tend to put off much of the
audience.  Perhaps people have fun using the music as a soundtrack to films
of the sea they run in their heads.  I like Reiner's powerful recording
with the Chicago best, but Boulez and the Cleveland again play gorgeously
and with a greater sense of the work's architecture.  Again, while I prefer
Reiner, Boulez does awfully well.

The sound - rich and clear at the same time - dazzles.  And for who better
than Debussy? If ever there was a reason for great sound, it's Debussy so
well played.  For me, one of the greatest recordings by this orchestra.

Steve Schwartz