Search - Claude Debussy, Alain Lombard, Armin Jordan :: Debussy: La mer; Nocturnes' Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune

A disc of tremendously sensitive Debussy performances

John Grabowski | USA | 01/17/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Pierre Boulez used to hold the honor of having done my favorite La Mer (his first recording from 1968, not his more recent DG reading). This maybe shouldn't be surprising. His clarity and attention to small orchestral nuances are ideal for Debussy's music. But Mr. Boulez has now lost the top slot honor to the relatively little-known Alain Lombard leading the relatively little-known Strasbourg Philharmonic Orchestra. If anyone thinks great performances have to come from marquee-name conductors and orchestras, they should listen to this disc.



Afternoon of a Faun is played at just the right tempi, with all the requisite dreaminess, but--and this is important--the fine details in the counterpoint, all the little finesses, are not blurred over. There are string and wind figurations, normally lost in the sea of pastels, that here stand out and reveal all the gorgeous detail in the work. La Mer is simply one of the most thrilling and masculine readings I've ever heard, with brass more forceful than we are used to hearing, and tempi a little bit brisker. (But if you want to hear how fast this piece used to be played, in the day of lighter French reeds and brass instruments, listen to Piero Coppola's 1932 recording. The way we approach this piece has changed a lot in half a century.) The climaxes are thunderous and mighty and thrilling. After you hear this, you realize just how hum-drum so many performances (Ashkenazy, Tilson Thomas, Dutoit) are. Nocturnes is suitably eerie, and this recording features the third movement with its chorus--left out of some discs for budgetary reasons, or at least I've heard. (Hiring a chorus for one short movement on a CD isn't cost effective.) In all these works, Lombard demonstrates a keen understanding of the structure--the high points and the low points, and how motifs emerge and recede, only to reemerge later with a more important purpose. How he judges the weight of each phrase as it appears and evolves is, for me, spot on. He gives cohesiveness to works that some people, especially those new to Debussy or to non-Germanic thinking in music in general, seems formless and meandering. To put it simply, these are very "tight" and clearheaded readings.



The disc contains as a bonus the delightful Clarinet Rhapsody, conducted not by Lombard but by Armin Jordan. While this won't displace the immortal Benny Goodman/John Barbirolli recording from 1941 (Goodman and Barbirolli find more humor and charm), it's well-performed, if maybe a tad straight-faced, and features some gorgeous liquid clarinet playing, almost without vibrato, by Antony Morf. A nice way to end a great disc of French orchestral music featuring La Mer, probably the piece I'd want to hear during my last moments on earth. Oh, and did you notice the price of this CD? Less than a supersized combo at Wendys! And Debussy doesn't have two thousand grams of saturated fat. What are you waiting for?



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