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This new Pelléas et Mélisande from the Opernhaus Zürich should be remembered as one of Dmitri Tcherniakov's most innovative production. Forget about the fountains, the caverns, the forest, the castles and the towers : here, the density of Maurice Maeterlinck’s and Claude Debussy’s symbolism becomes the starting point of an analytical journey into the human mind : it is now the psychoanalyst, ‘‘doctor’’ Golaud, who has to uncover the secrets of Melisande, an unfortunate and traumatized creature he brings home, and whose silence and puzzling attitude eventually bring him on the verge of insanity. But this production is also the occasion for a reunion between Dmitri Tcherniakov and French conductor Alain Altinoglu, after the tremendous success of the Tchaikovsky diptych Iolanta / The Nutcracker - arguably one of the most successful titles of the Bel Air Classiques catalogue. Their artistic complicity is intact : the precise, analytical but also nuanced and poetic baton of Altinoglu proves to be the best possible response to Tcherniakov’s subtle exploration of the human psychology. Corinne Winters, as Melisande, Jacques Imbrailo, as Pelléas, and especially Kyle Ketelsen, as Golaud, embody with an incandescent realism these characters plagued by a form of evil and violence that we will never quite understand.

Volume 5 of Naxos’s acclaimed series of Debussy’s orchestral music presents a potpourri of works that were either left incomplete by the composer or were orchestrated by others who greatly admired his music. His rarely-heard children’s ballet The Toy Box, dedicated to Debussy’s daughter Emma-Claude but not premièred until after the composer’s death, recalls the innocent world of his popular Children’s Corner suite. Based on Pierre Louÿs’ Chansons de Bilitis, Debussy’s Six épigraphes antiques evoke poetic scenes from the ancient world, as does the sole surviving portion of The Triumph of Bacchus.

The previous Debussy disc from these performers was reviewed with considerable enthusiasm, especially in the case of La Mer. I carefully avoided reading my colleagues' words prior to assessing this second disc but, having now repaired that, I am pleased to be able to echo their opinions. The SSO and Lan Shui have indeed got a remarkable feel for this music. Combined with a very fine and detailed recording in surround this second disc is also a winner.

The first thing that struck me was the structural clarity brought to the greatest work, Jeux. My list of alternative performances, going back to Jean Martinon in 1974, exhibit much refinement and tonal beauty but not until this new BIS SACD have I been so aware of the architecture underlying the beauty. I can only echo Jean-Pascal Vachon's booklet note when he states that this is one of the hardest pieces in the symphonic repertoire to analyse. To a listener this seemed to progress inevitably to its cryptic final notes, at no point was it just a wash of impressionist sound. The composer remarked ironically that he came to realise that a choreographer is a man who is very strong on arithmetic. This cleanly delineated performance would surely be less difficult for the dancers to count than many an alternative.

Jeux is only about a quarter of the disc and the other two works, also composed just before the First World War, are much less performed in the concert hall. A search online showed little evidence of stagings of La Boîte à joujoux and Khamma has yet to be staged. Neither were completed by Debussy himself. In the case of Khamma he orchestrated just a few pages before handing over to Charles Kœchlin "under his supervision". The work apparently annoyed Debussy, presumably the scenario lacked the cohesion he wanted but he could also have been doubtful about working with the notorious dancer Maud Allan. He described it as: "that queer ballet, with its trumpet calls, which suggest a riot or an outbreak of fire, and give one the shivers." Debussy's music was quite adventurous and contained, according to the composer, "the most recent discoveries of harmonic chemistry. " Kœchlin recalls that Debussy was happy with his orchestration. One commentator even suggests he came back to the piece. Certainly the plot line is sufficient to make for an eventful work. Kœchlin was no mean composer himself and he makes a splendidly dramatic job of Debussy's score, sufficient, one would have thought, to make it more frequent in our concert halls than it is. Perhaps it is true that the final score sounds more like Kœchlin than Debussy but since Debussy approved, that seems irrelevant. Here the SSO and Shui give it their considerable best and it makes for good listening whatever its perceived shortcomings.

The final piece is his ballet for children La Boîte à joujoux. In this case he orchestrated most of it leaving a little to be completed, when illness overtook him, by his friend Caplet. Entertaining though this piece is it does not have the coherence of Ravel's Ma mère l'Oye and to my mind it is not too surprising it is neglected. However, second class Debussy is a great deal better than many another lesser composer. Performed as it is here the work charms the ear throughout and is very much worth the occasional hearing.

I have already mentioned the very informative booklet notes by Professor Vachon. With two out of three works which are obscure they are more than usually useful and maintain BIS' reputation for providing high quality documentation. Overall I would recommend this most strongly for Jeux and regard Khamma as a valuable reminder that some works do not deserve neglect. The recording allows the spacious acoustic of Singapore's Esplanade Concert Hall to be heard, a reminder that yet another city has a better large hall than London.

– MusicWeb International (Dave Billinge)

The Hallé and Sir Mark Elder follow their recent highly acclaimed Debussy Nocturnes album, with a stunning orchestral collection including a world premiere recording. Debussy took seven years to produce Images, following the success of La mer, and the resulting work, which was hailed by Ravel, displays the composer’s mastery in varied material which is at times strident, eschewing any hint of ‘Impressionism’ (a term he disliked), lush and evoking feelings of loss and alienation. Pierre Boulez claimed that “modern music was awoken” by Debussy’s response to Mallarmé’s poem L’après-midid’un faune and the work, with its sumptuous opening flute line, certainly established the composer’s credentials and has rightly become a cornerstone of orchestral repertoire. The album features a world premiere recording of Colin Matthew’s orchestration of Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut, from the 2nd Book of Images for piano. This arrangement follows Matthews’ universally acclaimed orchestrations of the Debussy Préludes and of Les soirs illuminés par l'ardeur du charbon featured in the recent Nocturnes release.

Debussy: Piano Works, Vol. 1

The centenary of Debussy’s death provides an opportunity to (re)discover some hidden treasures from the Arcana catalogue, which have been unavailable for many years. Debussy’s piano works make up a vast corpus of such outstanding quality that it can rightly be considered to be the most important produced in the last century. He completely renewed the art of piano playing; at the same time, he gave a decisive new direction to the very idea of structure in music. Both these aspects are found in the works here played by Stany David Lasry on two restored Érard pianos, covering the period from the works of his youth to the two great sets of Préludes, which constitute a veritable compendium of twentieth-century piano writing. The French pianist also appears in the recording of mélodies featuring bass-baritone Thierry Félix, which includes Debussy’s last sixteen songs (all those composed after he completed Pelléas et Mélisande) preceded by Mandoline and four songs composed in his early maturity.

DEBUSSY Complete Solo Piano Music • Jean-Efflam Bavouzet (pn) • CHANDOS 10743 (5 CDs: 358:44)


It was exactly one year ago, in issue 35:4, that I reviewed an integral set of Debussy’s works for solo piano on Centaur performed by Larissa Dedova, noting the absence of a couple of unpublished pieces which, technically speaking, made her “complete” survey not as complete as Roy Howat’s highly regarded set on Tall Poppies. The two items missing from Dedova’s survey that were included in Howat’s were the Étude retrouvée , an earlier version of the 11th etude from Book II of the Etudes, discovered in manuscript in 1977; and Intermède , the composer’s 1882 piano arrangement of the second movement from his 1880 Piano Trio No. 1.


Something that struck me immediately about this Debussy set by Jean-Efflam Bavouzet was that not only is it spread over five discs, compared to Howat’s and Dedova’s four each, but that there appears to be nearly 50 minutes more music on Bavouzet’s set. Howat takes a total of 298:26; Dedova, 309:54. Even accounting for the two short pieces Howat includes that Dedova doesn’t, the 11-minute-plus difference over a span of five hours is easily explained by tempo differences. But Bavouzet’s 358:54—essentially an entire extra disc’s timing—has to have some other explanation.


The answer will be found on disc 5, on which Bavouzet performs piano transcriptions of three of Debussy’s orchestral works, Khamma, Jeux , and La Boîte à joujoux . Ironically, this makes Bavouzet’s survey both more complete and less complete than Howat’s, for while Howat doesn’t include these questionable transcriptions of orchestral scores, Bavouzet doesn’t include the Intermède . He does, however, include the Étude retrouvée . Of the three piano reductions, Khamma is the most problematic. For a fuller discussion of this Légende dansée , see the review of Jun Märkl’s Naxos recording in 34:4. In a nutshell, Debussy had a falling out early on with Maud Allan, the dancer/actress/choreographer for whom he was composing Khamma . The result was that he walked off the job midway through the project, leaving it in the hands of Charles Koechlin to complete the unfinished score and to orchestrate it. Debussy’s piano reduction was intended for rehearsal purposes only, never for actual performance. That applies equally to Jeux . It, too, was conceived as an orchestral work, its piano reduction being prepared for the dancers to rehearse to, much as opera singers rehearse their parts with a répétiteur at the piano. As Bavouzet explains in his album note, Debussy’s piano reduction of Jeux is incomprehensible and essentially unplayable as a piece for two hands. A version for two pianos was published a number of years ago, but for this recording, Bavouzet has made his own two-hand arrangement.


With regard to the three ballets, danced poems, pantomimes, or whatever one wishes to call them, La Boîte à joujoux (The Toy Box) is the only one that enjoys real legitimacy as an actual work for piano, since Debussy originally wrote it for piano in 1913 for his daughter Emma, partially orchestrating it himself later. However, even in the case of the piano score, sources differ on its original form. According to Roger Nichols, the album’s alternate note author, Debussy finished the piano score in October 1913—piano, singular. But All Music Guide states that the work was completed in two-piano score—pianos, plural. We’re dealing here with a well-known work by a famous composer dating from the 20th century, not some faded, barely legible, 17th-century manuscript discovered in the wine cellar of some Benedictine monastery. You’d think the matter of provenance in the case of Debussy’s score would be common knowledge. So, who’s right, Nichols or All Music Guide ? To settle the matter I turned to the IMSLP/Petrucci Music library, which publishes scores online, and according to its website, imslp.org, the first edition was published in 1913 by A. Durand et Cie for solo piano. So Nichols is right on that count.


A year later a suite was made of the work by Léon Roques and also published by Durand, but for piano four hands, not for two pianos, as claimed by All Music Guide . At about the same time, Debussy began orchestrating La Boîte à joujoux , but completed only 93 measures of it, leaving the orchestral scoring to be completed by André Caplet in 1919, a year after Debussy’s death. Thus, Debussy never heard the orchestral version. If you thought the matter was decided—the piece exists for solo piano, for piano four hands, and for orchestra—you will search in vain for it at ArkivMusic under any of the following categories: “Solo Piano,” “2 Pianos/4 Hands,” “Orchestral or Piano.” No indeed; you’ll find it hiding, along with Le martyre de St Sébastien , under one of only two listed “Stage Works,” even though once you drill down into the recordings, you’ll find an equal number for piano and for orchestra. This also begs the question as to why Khamma , a stage work, is listed under “Orchestral or Piano,” and Jeux , another stage work, is listed under “Orchestral.” Maybe it’s time we give serious consideration to the once suggested idea of filing musical works by key and have done with it. The point of this digression is that, with the exception of La Boîte à joujoux , which is played by lots of pianists, but not usually as part of a survey of Debussy’s complete piano music, Bavouzet has added an extra disc to his collection containing two works, Khamma and Jeux, that are infrequently or rarely heard on piano. In the case of Jeux , you could say never, since the arrangement heard here is Bavouzet’s own.


I asked to review this set because I was very favorably impressed by Bavouzet’s first volume in a projected Beethoven cycle, and I can’t say I was disappointed. Perhaps I should have mentioned at the outset, however, that strictly speaking this set is not new. The recordings date from between 2006 and 2009, and were released as individual discs, four of which—Volumes 1, 2, 4, and 5—were reviewed by Alan Swanson and Colin Clarke in 31:2, 31:5, 32:5, and 33:6, respectively. It doesn’t appear that Volume 3, containing the Suite bergamasque and other stand-alone pieces, was ever reviewed. The set has now been gathered together in a very handsome box with each disc in its own heavy cardboard envelope and its own booklet containing notes for just those works on the enclosed CD. The entire set is available from Amazon for $59.99, which works out to $11.99 per disc, good value for the money.


Bavouzet’s playing, as expected, is fluid and atmospheric, his touch innately responsive to Debussy’s gradations of tone and keyboard colorations. Bavouzet has been living with Debussy for a long time. An earlier (1998) Canyon CD of the Etudes was reviewed by Charles Timbrell in 21:4. While I find Bavouzet’s approach well enough suited to the music and his readings expressively shaped and shaded, if I had to make a hard choice, I think I would still lean marginally towards Roy Howat. The Scottish pianist has come to be regarded as a world renowned Debussy scholar, having written extensively on the composer and edited the complete piano music for Durand’s Œuvres Complètes de Claude Debussy . Howat’s research has led him to view with some skepticism the typecasting of Debussy’s music as overly Impressionistic, noting in particular the composer’s strong rhythmic clarity. Howat’s interpretive approach is thus one that lends the music sharper lines and less vague harmonic textures than we often hear from other pianists, Bavouzet included. Still, given the enormous range and quality of Debussy’s works for piano, there’s room on the shelf for more than one complete set, and after turning to Howat, Bavouzet would be my very next choice. So, obviously recommended, assuming that you haven’t already acquired one or more of the discs individually. Isn’t it always maddening when record companies do that?


FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

Debussy: Nocturnes, L. 91, La damoiselle élue, L. 62 & Le ma

Maybe reviewers fuss too much about couplings, but in this case, with the Prelude a l'apresmidi dun faune these days extending the timings of virtually every Debussy issue, and with nearly two decades separating it from the later Jeux and La boite a joujoux, as well as it not being a ballet—oh, all right: it may have been conceived for the stage, and was choreographed (and vulgarized) by Nijinsky in 1912—surely a more enterprising choice in keeping with the theme would have been the contemporary and unjustly neglected ballet Khamma. With the standard of performance on offer here, that would indeed have formed a cherishable disc. As it happens, Tilson Thomas's Prelude is very fine: richly drawn and, compared to the recent versions from Boulez (DG) and Solti (Decca), traditionally drawn out, long-breathed and languorous. Overloud horns in the fourth bar would seem to forecast fog, not heat-haze; in other respects the balance (from EMI's Abbey Road Studio No. 1) is good, with integrated but focused solo strings, harps and antique cymbals.

"Toy-boxes are really towns in which the toys live like people" wrote Andre Helle who, in 1913, devised the scenario for La boite a joujoux (adding "or perhaps towns are just boxes in which people live like toys"). But Debussy made no attempt at meaningful symbolism; "something to amuse the children—nothing more" he said. In giving life to the wooden figures, and with its prominent role for piano, inevitably one's thoughts turn to Petrushka, far more dramatically effective, but hardly a children's story—well, not a child of 1913 anyway. Tilson Thomas is more artful than Torteher on Chandos: in the first tableau his doll dances her waltz with more look-at-me' allure and grace—Tortelier's rubato is comparatively (perhaps aptly) mechanical—and, after Punch has biffed the little soldier on the nose, an angrier captain pops his head out of the box. On the debit side, a wooden doll surely wouldn't pray as quietly as does the LSO clarinet in the following tableau after the battle (track 4, 4'45": the marking is only piano); the distant shepherd's piping in the third tableau is not really distant at all, and the flutes are too loud at the moment of embrace between the soldier and the doll at the end of the scene. Whilst I'm grumbling, Sony's notes don't include a synopsis—as entertainment, this music, unlike Jeux, is dependent on knowledge of the stage action (Chandos supply a detailed scenario). If forced to make a choice between the two, it would be Tilson Thomas; his is the more polished, confident and stylish account.

Perhaps Debussy was attracted to the idea of a children's ballet in 1913 to cleanse himself from the sins of Nijinsky's staging of his Prelude and Jeux (May 1912 and 1913 respectively). While enthusiastically welcoming Simon Rattle's Jeux (EMI), CH noted that the music's free-born invention was "sacrificed a little in favour of a richer romanticism". It could be argued, too, that Haitink (Philips) achieves his unrivalled clarity and delicacy at the expense of a degree of passion. I happen to feel that both, more successfully than Tilson Thomas, and in their quite different ways, achieve a special fantasy, and that contrejour lighting which Debussy was aiming at in his orchestration to oversimplify, it's a question of ensuring equal prominence for the woodwind. The LSO strings are unsteady in their opening four-bar chord (unusually played here as two plus two), but there's a line of accumulating energy from the main theme at fig. 51 (12'29") through to the climax at fig. 71 (16'23") which is less easy to feel in Rattle's and Haitink's accounts. With a slightly faster basic tempo this Jeux bears out Tilson Thomas's judgement, as he himself put it in GRAMOPHONE in February 1991, in knowing "what to hold on to and what to throw away".

-- Gramophone [11/1992]

Debussy: Images pour orchestre, Prélude à l'après-midi d'un

Includes work(s) for pno by Claude Debussy. Soloist: François-Joël Thiollier.

How fortunate that, with modern technology, the most subtle of nuances in a performance can be successfully captured in a recording. The music of the great French master Debussy - who revolutionised and pushed the boundaries of tonal harmony, as well as discovered new sound and expressive possibilities for musical instruments - is reproduced in this high resolution quality recording like never before.

The three chamber music works represented here were all written in the last three years of Debussy’s life and are a fusion of the styles he used to adopt throughout his composing career.

The cavalier and Moorish flavour of the Cello-Piano Sonata, the subtly seductive Violin Piano Sonata and the beautifully transparent Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp are masterfully performed by members of the legendary Boston Symphony Orchestra, with the great Michael Tilson Thomas at the piano. As an added bonus, we have the mystical Syrinx for solo flute which completes this beautiful album.

Debussy, C.: Premiere Rapsodie / Tiensuu, J.: Puro / Kaipain

The Covid pandemic caused the cancellation of the performances of Pelléas et Mélisande at the Opéra National de Bordeaux, which approached Alpha in order to make an audio recording of this masterpiece. So here is that unexpected but highly anticipated new version, with an exceptional cast and a young conductor, Pierre Dumoussaud, whose calling card it is fast becoming, since he has already conducted it in many houses. ‘His conducting calls for nothing but praise, striking a fine balance between analytical clarity and theatrical life, while at the same time bringing out the extraordinary modernity of this intoxicating music’, wrote Christian Merlin in Le Figaro of one of his staged performances. The ‘disarming sincerity’ of Pelléas (Stanislas de Barbeyrac), the ‘constant emotion’ of Mélisande (Chiara Skerath), the ‘bitingly intense singing’ of Golaud (Alexandre Duhamel) – these are some of the comments elicited by the 2018 performances in the staging of Philippe Béziat and Florent Siaud, the intended revival of which this year was prevented by the health emergency. The album cover features a photo from that memorable production.

Recording information: Auditorium de Lyons, France.