A Life-enhancing Disc
GERALD FENECH warmly recommends chamber and instrumental music by Claude Debussy
'... mercurially performed and recorded ...'
Claude Debussy (1862-1918) is sometimes considered as the first impressionist French composer, although he vigorously rejected the term. He was among the most influential composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and even today his music is still a topic for discussion.
Born to a family of modest means and little cultural involvement, Debussy showed enough musical talent to be admitted, at the age of ten, to France's leading music college, the Paris Conservatoire. He originally studied the piano but found his vocation in innovative composition, despite the opposition of the Conservatoire's conservative professors. He took many years to develop his mature style and was nearly forty when he achieved international fame in 1902, with the only opera he completed, Pelléas et Mélisande.
Debussy's orchestral music was, to a considerable extent, a reaction against Wagner and the German musical tradition. He regarded the classical symphony as obsolete and sought an alternative in the symphonic sketches La Mer (1903-1905). His piano works include sets of twenty-four préludes and twelve Études, and throughout his career he wrote mélodies based on a wide variety of poetry, including his own.
He was greatly influenced by the Symbolist poetic movement of the later nineteenth century, and a small number of works have important parts for chorus. In his final years he focused on chamber music, completing three of six planned sonatas for different combinations of instruments, and this thrilling issue's programme is centred wholly on this genre of music.
With early influences including Russian and Far Eastern music and works by Chopin, Debussy developed his own style of harmony and orchestral colouring which was eventually derided but unsuccessfully resisted. A great triumph this for the composer, over the narrowmindedness of the establishment.
Debussy's music strongly influenced such composers as Béla Bartók and Olivier Messiaen, and his innovations have remained relevant to this day. The composer died from cancer in Paris aged fifty-five, after a career that spanned more than thirty years, leaving for posterity a musical idiom that even today sounds as groundbreaking as it was then.
The album opens with the epoch-defining Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (1894), in a chamber arrangement for wind quintet, string quintet, harp and crotales by French oboist and composer David Walter. While the more sparsely-scored textures are tailor made for chamber performance, the richness of the compelling tutti passages come across with a transparency that brings rays of light to this scene of the mind.
Listen — Debussy: Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune
(CDA68463 track 1, 1:12-1:56) ℗ 2025 Hyperion Records Ltd :
The Violin Sonata in G minor of 1917, completed less than a year before his death at the age of fifty-five, is a challenging piece full of architectural nuances that alternate with moments of great virtuosity.
The Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp (1916) is the only one of four projected sonatas for more unorthodox instrumentation. It has about it an elusive air, as if presenting the listener with some scene from ancient classicism, and its fluid shifts of mood, pacing and timbre are wonderfully meshed together with supreme mastery.
Listen — Debussy: Pastorale (Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp)
(CDA68463 track 5, 0:00-0:56) ℗ 2025 Hyperion Records Ltd :
The Cello Sonata in D minor was the first of the sonatas to be composed. Dating from 1915, it features three very contrasting movements: the Prologue's alternation between the rhetorical and the pensive, the spectral mystery and macabre pizzicati of the central Serenade, and the infectiously flowing sweep of the energetic Finale.
The G minor String Quartet of 1893 was Debussy's first piece of mature chamber music and, notwithstanding the echoes of Russian sounds as well as Franck, it has the unmistakable stamp of novelty of its composer.
Listen — Debussy: Très modéré (String Quartet in G minor)
(CDA68463 track 14, 0:00-0:54) ℗ 2025 Hyperion Records Ltd :
A life-enhancing disc, mercurially performed and recorded, and an exhilarating celebration of the Nash Ensemble's thrilling ensemble playing and infectious musicianship on the occasion of their sixtieth anniversary. Warmly recommended to all.
Copyright © 21 January 2025
Gerald Fenech,
Gzira, Malta
