Désiré-Emile Inghelbrecht (conductor)
The Complete Erato Recordings
rec. 1929-62
Erato 2173251689 [16 CDs: ca 1080]
This 16-CD box contains Désiré-Émile Inghelbrecht’s complete discographic legacy for Pathé, Ducretet-Thomson, Columbia and Erato, spanning his 78 RPM records from 1929 to 1939, LP recordings from 1953 to 1955, and live broadcasts from 1955 to 1962. The LPs occupy discs 1 to 9, the 78s discs 10 to 14 and the live recordings discs to 15 to 16.
A large part of his LP legacy was devoted to the music of Debussy and other French composers but the box reveals his affinity with some non-French repertoire and also preserves performances of his own music. Remakes and the live performances also allow for points of comparison between the different staging posts of his career. The Debussy Ducretet-Thomson remasterings are from Testament, the label that transferred these post-War LPs a number of years ago, or have been newly remastered by Art & Son Studio, Annecy in HD 192kHz/24-bit.
CD 1 is a miscellaneous one that contains music from Berlioz, Gounod, Bizet and Delibes in 1956 recordings with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Orchestre du Theatre des Champs-Elysees. Predictably, perhaps, his Le Carnaval romain overture was rather zestier pre-war (it’s in CD 12) than with the post-war LPO but the sequence of ballet music, entr’actes and marches is accomplished and spirited and benefit from selective remasterings – some were remastered in 2002. CD 2 contains Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole and Rapsodie norvégienne with violinist Devy Erlih, which I reviewed when it appeared courtesy of Forgotten Records. It’s been newly remastered for this box set as have the two Peer Gynt suites where we can hear the conductor stretch out more expressively in the first suite than he had in the 1930s (again it’s in CD 12).
CD 3 is very special as it contains his memorable Fauré recordings that here couple two LPs – the Requiem and music from Shylock and Pelleas et Mélisande. Fortunately, this is not, in the main, an Original Jackets release – also known as a ruse to milk the public – and so CD lengths are sensible and redistribution of LP material has been thoughtfully done. This particular disc is ex-Testament. The characterful tenor in two of the Shylock excerpts is Henri Legay. In the Requiem the two fine soloists are Francoise Ogéas and Bernard Demigny. Pre-war recordings of the Requiem were inclined to be over-reverential and Inghelbrecht’s judicious balance between the expressive and austere elements of the work are a splendid corrective to an interpretative attitude that was to linger for decades. Rhythms are crisp, the organ of Jeanne Baudry-Godard is finely balanced, and there is an excellent orchestral sonority. The Cantique de Jean Racine is relatively zippy, though not cold.
CD 4 is from a Testament remastering and contains Debussy’s Nocturnes – compare and contrast this 1950s recording with that of his mid-30s traversal contained in CD 11 where Sirènes was a good minute slower and ignore CD 11’s typo timing of 1:24 as it’s 11:24. La Mer and Iberia are both from Ducretet-Thomson and you’ll enjoy comparing the former with the live version in CD 16 made a few years later which is almost identical in timing but more animated in the live reading.
Also from his Ducretet-Thomson legacy, and again to be found on Testament, are La Demoiselle élue and L’Enfant prodigue. The former is graced by the excellent soprano Madeleine Gorge and mezzo Jacqueline Joly whilst the three soloists for the latter are Gorge, Legay and Bernard Cottret. There’s an especially rousing trio finale. I’m afraid I don’t have the stomach for Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien. I’ve tried many times and find it unlistenablebut for those who feel positively – and I’m sure many do – the performance, which dates from 1955, is another Testament remaster as is CD 7 which contains Jeux, Images (minus Iberia), the Chansons de Charles d’Orleans and Ballades de François Villon. One can contrast the Villon songs, here with Bernard Plantey, with the live 1962 stereo recording with Camille Maurane who takes Ballade de Villon a s’amye at a brisker lick than Plantey. We’re lucky to have both recordings but especially fortunate to have Maurane at his characterful best.
The complete Daphnis et Chloé is in CD 8 and is another Testament remaster with the Orchestre du Theatre des Champs-Elysees, recorded in 1953. It’s a splendid achievement and only its mono sound will cause anyone to demur. Though it lacks Munch’s sensuous eroticism, its sense of clarity is never a question of objectification – merely another way to approach the score. Ravel occupies part of CD 9 – a truly lovely recording of Ma mère l’Oye, Rapsodie espagnole and Une barque sur l’océan. Admirers of the conductor’s compositions will be very pleased to see the first CD appearance of his orchestral version of La Nursery, recorded in 1954 and heard in Art & Son’s remastering. These delightfully light character pieces, so deftly orchestrated, so skilfully projected, can be contrasted with the rather more extensive version on CD 14 recorded on 78s.
With CD 10 we enter the 78 years and I must register my usual complaint about Art & Son’s remastering of such material, which is that it is airless and too noise-suppressed. It’s certainly not unattractive but nevertheless I find it disappointing. There’s a Bizet disc – the usual suspects from Carmen and the two L’Arlésienne Suites, including a wobbly Parisian saxophone in the second suite’s Intermezzo. The last item is Patrie, where the brass players sound flat. Some of these performances are receiving CD premieres, it’s claimed, including the Gounod Faust ballet music.
Most of the pre-war recordings are with the Orchestre de l’Association des Concerts Pasdeloup whose standards are variable, to put it generously. The 1929 recording of Debussy’s Petite suite is deftly directed but the winds’ tuning is very distracting whilst the orchestral version of Ma mère l’Oye, recorded the same year, is heard in a dull-sounding transfer. Pathé-Art recordings from the late 1920s and early 1930s are not always the easiest to remaster but the woolly transfers and indifferent performance standards make these sides uneven at best, despite the distinction of the conducting. Yet there are some things that retain their power and a number can be found in CD 12. Delibes’s ballet music from Lakmé and a sequence of Chabrier pieces impress – the Parisian wind tuning turning the former into something even more piquant. Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite No.1 is actually played by Le Grand Orchestre Symphoniques, which I assume was a pick-up band. If so, it has few of the distracting idiosyncrasies of the Orchestre de l’Association des Concerts Pasdeloup. There’s the little-known Jolly Brothers waltz of Robert Vollstedt – full marks if you’ve come across this, as I’ve never even heard of the composer – to end a disc which seems to contain first CD appearances of everything.
CD 13 brings Wagner, with a full complement of rickety tuning and odd balances, a rather interesting Strauss Till Eulenspiegel’s lustige Streiche, some evocative Borodin and Lyadov – which the winds make sound genuinely oriental (though I doubt that was the intention) and the first appearance of a previously unpublished Fête enfantine by Inghelbrecht himself, recorded in 1937, and strikingly present. This kaleidoscopic piece quotes Stephen Foster, mines Chinoiserie, adds bells, sarcastic brass and a voluble chorus. Bizarre and exciting.
There is more Inghelbrecht on CD 14. La Nursery, in its orchestral version, was recorded in 1929-31 and its last panel in 1934. This is light, bright incidental music of aperçu-like charm and wit. La Légende du Grand Saint-Nicolas is cast for two solo singers and orchestra and is again relatively light and short. His Sinfonia breve is a crisp, three-movement study in lyric neo-classicism. There is also a 40-second track in which Inghelbrecht talks. This disc also contains the first release of Elsa Barraine’s Fête des Colonies, recorded in 1937, an ear-titillating albeit somewhat repetitive sequence of picture postcards inspired by France’s African colonies. The final panel is called Apothéose and features a grand guignol organ part. It’s very noticeable that the previously unpublished pieces are in excellent sound, much better than the commercial 78s, which again makes the point that the latter have been over-filtered.
The last two discs contain live Erato Debussy material recorded between 1955 and 1962 in which everything is stereo with the single exception of the mono 1955 Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. Both discs have been well remastered in full by Art & Son. These include live performances of things he recorded for Ducretet-Thomson a few years before but which, live, are slightly more expansive in tempo – Sirènes, for example or La Demoiselle élue. Then there is the 1958 La Mer which is almost identical in tempo to the slightly earlier 1953 studio recording, though there are a few coughs and audience noises. Such incidents are a feature of these live performances though they’ve never put me off. And just to demonstrate that his tempi were neither static nor were they prone to any expressive languor in concert, he turns in a brisker reading of Jeux live in 1962 than he had five years earlier.
Inghelbrecht proves throughout this box to be a commanding conductor of this repertoire – direct, disciplined, disinclined to make passing expressive gestures and preferring instead to explore the spine of the music. His Orchestre National de la Radiodiffusion Française is a more precise, accurate ensemble than the pre-war groups, and inevitably it lacks their idiosyncratic Gallic qualities. The most valuable things here are the Debussy pieces, obviously, given Inghelbrecht’s status as his colleague and also devoted but clear-eyed exponent of the composer’s music. He was present at the premiere of Pelléas et Mélisande, and his recording of it is not in this box but can be found elsewhere for a special price on Testament – the 1951 broadcast with the Philharmonia features Camille Maurane, Suzanne Danco, Henri-Bertrand Etcheverry, Oda Slobodskaya et al.
If you just want his Debussy, the six Testament single discs are an obvious port of call but, if so, you’ll forego his Fauré, for example, as well as his own charming compositions. This box includes all the Debussy material in the same remasterings and includes a whole lot else besides at a very acceptable price and with a fine booklet note.
Jonathan Woolf
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Contents
CD 1
Hector Berlioz
La Carnaval romain-Overture op. 9
La Damnation de Faust op. 24, excerpts
Charles Gounod
Ballet Music from Faust
Georges Bizet
Carmen Suite
L’Arlésienne Suites Nos. 1 & 2
Patrie op. 19
Léo Delibes
Entr’actes & Ballet Music from Lakmé
Fernand Dufrène (flute), Monique Linval (soprano), Jean Michel (tenor), Bernard Demigny (baritone)
London Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestre du Theatre des Champs-Elysees, Chorale Marcel Briclot
rec. 1954-56
CD 2
Edouard Lalo
Symphony espagnole op. 21
Rapsodie norvégienne
Edvard Grieg
Peer Gynt Suites Nos. 1 and 2
Devy Erlih (violin), Claudy Mas-Michel (soprano)
London Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestre du Theatre des Champs-Elysees
rec. 1954-56
CD 3
Gabriel Fauré
Shylock op. 57
Pelleas et Melisande Suite, orchestral suite, op. 80
Requiem op. 48
Cantique de Jean Racine op.11
Henri Legay (tenor), Francoise Ogéas (soprano), Bernard Demigny (baritone)
Orchestre et Choeurs du Theatre des Champs-Elysees
rec. 1955
CD 4
Claude Debussy
Nocturnes
Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune
Marche ecossaise sur un thème populaire
La Mer
Iberia
Fernand Dufrène (flute)
Orchestre National de la Radiodiffusion Francaise, Orchestre du Theatre des Champs-Elysees
rec.1953-54
CD 5
Claude Debussy
La Demoiselle élue
Noël des enfants qui n’ont plus de maison
L’Enfant prodigue
Madeleine Gorge (soprano), Jacqueline Joly (mezzo soprano), Henri Legay (tenor), Bernard Cottret (bass)
Choeurs des femmes et Maîtrise de la Radiodiffusion Française, Orchestre du Theatre des Champs-Elysees
rec.1953
CD 6
Claude Debussy
Le Martyre de saint Sébastien
André Falcon (speaker), Claudine Collart (alto), Jeannine Collart (alto), Christiane Gayraud (alto)
Choeurs et Maîtrise de la Radiodiffusion Française, Orchestre du Theatre des Champs-Elysees
rec.1955
CD 7
Claude Debussy
Jeux
Images I and III
Chansons de Charles d’Orleans
Ballades de François Villon
Freda Betty (contralto), Bernard Plantey (baritone),
Chorale Symphonique and Orchestre National de la Radiodiffusion Francaise
rec.1957
CD 8
Maurice Ravel
Daphnis et Chloë Suite
Choeurs de la R.T.F and Orchestre du Theatre des Champs-Elysees
rec. 1953
CD 9
Maurice Ravel
Ma mère l’Oye
Rapsodie espagnole
Une Barque sur l’océan
Désiré-Emile Inghelbrecht
La Nursery
Orchestre du Theatre des Champs-Elysees
rec.1954-55
CD 10
Georges Bizet
Carmen Orchestral Suite 1
Carmen – excerpts
L’Arlésienne Suites Nos. 1 and 2
Patrie, op.19
Jules Viard (saxophone), Gaston Crunelle (flute)
Association Chorale Pasdeloup, Orchestre des Concerts Pasdeloup, Grand Orchestre des Festivals Debussy
rec.1929-34
CD 11
Claude Debussy
Petite Suite
Marche ecossaise sur un thème Populaire
Nocturnes
Le Martyre de saint Sébastien
Maurice Ravel
Ma mère l’Oye
Orchestre des Concerts Pasdeloup, Chorus and Grand Orchestre des Festivals Debussy
rec.1929-34
CD 12
Hector Berlioz
La Carnaval romain-Overture op. 9
Léo Delibes
Entr’actes & Ballet Music from Lakmé
Emmanuel Chabrier
Joyeuse Marche
Habanera
Danse slave and Fête polonaise from Le Roi malgré lui
Gabriel Fauré
Masques et Bergamasques
Paul Dukas
L’Apprenti sorcier
Fanfare pour précéder
Edvard Grieg
Peer Gynt Suites No. 1
Robert Vollstedt
Waltz “Jolly Brothers”
Orchestre de l’Association des Concerts Pasdeloup, Grand Orchestre des Festivals Debussy, Le Grand Orchestre Symphoniques
rec.1929-34
CD 13
Richard Wagner
Vorspiel & Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde
Richard Strauss
Till Eulenspiegel op. 28
Alexander Borodin
In the Steppes of Central Asia
Polovtsian Dances and Peasants’ Chorus
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
Tsar Saltan: Flight of the Bumble Bee
Anatoly Lyadov
8 Russian Folk Songs op. 58
Désiré-Emile Inghelbrecht
Fête infantine
Association Chorale Pasdeloup, Orchestre des Concerts Pasdeloup, Children’s Choir, Orchestre National de la Radiodiffusion Française
rec.1929-37
CD 14
Désiré-Emile Inghelbrecht
La Nursery
La Légende du Grand Saint-Nicolas
Sinfonia breve
Autographe de l’auteur
4 Fanfares
Elsa Barraine
Fête des Colonies
Claude-Joseph Rouget De Lisle
La Marseillaise
Jany Delille (soprano), René Barral (baritone), Désiré-Emile Inghelbrecht (speaker), Association Chorale Pasdeloup, Orchestre des Concerts Pasdeloup, Grand Orchestre des Festivals Debussy, Groupe de Cuivres de l’Orchestre National de la Radiodiffusion Française, Orchestre National de la Radiodiffusion Française
rec.1929-39
CD 15
Claude Debussy
Printemps
La Demoiselle élue
Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune
Nocturnes
Ballades de François Villon
Micgheline Grancher (soprano), Marie-Luze Delarie (mezzo soprano), Camille Maurane (baritone), Fernand Dufresne (flute)
Choeur de femmes de la RTF, Orchestre National de La RTF
rec. live 1955-62
CD 16
Claude Debussy
La Mer
Images
Jeux
Orchestre National de la RTF
rec. live 1958 and 1962
