Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
String Quartet & Sonatas
Contents listed after review
The Nash Ensemble
rec. 2023, All Saints’ Church, East Finchley, London; 2024, Henry Wood Hall, London (Quartet)
Hyperion CDA68463 [76]
Debussy’s talent was spotted early. He was enrolled at the Paris Conservatoire aged just ten. His tendency to push boundaries and test rules was also in evidence from a tender age. When asked by someone at the institution which rule he followed when composing, Debussy replied “Mon plaisir!” After returning from his period at the Villa Medici (following his Prix de Rome success) in 1887, he was a receptive vessel, ready to be filled with Wagner, Russian music, Satie and music from outside the conventional European orbit.
In 1893 Debussy turned 31. The musical world welcomed Verdi’s Falstaff in February and later that year both Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique and Dvořák’s New World symphonies were premiered. These pieces could be seen as marking the end of an era. The same year also saw the first performance of Manon Lescaut, Puccini’s first big success and the debut staging of that double-bill verissimo classic Cav and Pag (Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci , premiered in 1890 and 1892, respectively). In Paris that summer, Debussy saw and was bowled over by Maeterlinck’s symbolist play Pelléas et Mélisande. It was at this time Debussy composed his String Quartet.
For the first and only time in his music, he gave this quartet a key (G minor) and an opus number (10). César Franck’s quartet of just a few years earlier must have served as a model, yet that symphonic piece, one of the longest in the repertory, is quite different to Debussy’s example. In this new CD from the Nash Ensemble it is programmed last, but I hope readers will forgive my dealing with the works presented chronologically.
In this quartet I hear clear shades of a lot of Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Grieg (whose first quartet was also in G minor) and Dvořák; yet Debussy takes these influences and moulds them with his own brand of exoticism, colour and what you might call “slumberness”. The Nash Ensemble are recorded warmly and their version is similarly sultry and temperate of mood. The rhythmic scherzo is a good place to sample their cohesion and interplay. They are appropriately lyrical and contemplative in the slow movement, but do not over-do it (some groups turn this into a kind of Kismet kitsch-fest). I compared their recording with its most recent competitor Quatuor Arod on Erato; I found that Hyperion presented a far more natural sound picture with less spotlighting. The Arod’s pizzicato can be deafening at times and that surely can’t be right.
A year after the quartet came the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. Debussy was on friendly terms with writer Mallarmé who wrote the dreamy poem based on the faun (a half-man half-goat mythical creature) rising from his midday slumber to try to recapture a dream of ecstasy with frolicking nymphs, now awake, then drifting asleep again. If this reads as frivolous nonsense today in the hard reality of our uncertain, turbulent times, make no mistake about it: in 1894 this music was about to start a revolution. Unbounded by rules and constraints, it breaks free and feels almost improvised. Boulez wrote that modern music was awakened by it.
The Nash Ensemble present the piece in a neat arrangement for twelve instruments. They employ both a wind and string quintet, with added harp and percussion. Dodecaphony you might say, just not in the way Schoenberg might view the term. The performance captures the essence of the orchestral score very effectively. The flute solo is beguiling and the strings shimmer and create the perfect mise-en-scène of the balmy afternoon pastorale. As the piece develops, all the players have the opportunity to add colour and do so with satisfying parity. The Nash usually eschew the need for a conductor, (although they have a select list of artists they do work with on occasion); most groups of this size would need one for the Prélude and it is a testament to their musicality and technical prowess that they do not.
The late chamber music of Debussy feels different. Now in his fifties, not a well man and affected by the European crisis that had led to war in the Summer of 1914, his creativity did not flow as easily. From 1915, he gradually began to compose again: En blanc et noir, the 12 études and the cello sonata, the first of the three sonatas presented here by the Nash.
Debussy’s music never adhered to convention, but in these last works he made a special effort to point out these works would not follow the structure of classical Germanic tradition. They would be patriotically French, in the manner of Rameau and Couperin. In the cello sonata, we hear Adrian Brendel and Simon Crawford-Phillips, who make a persuasive case for this nostalgic, tender creation. Brendel plays in a fluid languid style that I find completely appropriate for the work. In Harmonia Mundi’s 2018 release Les Trois Sonates (review) Jean-Guihen Queyras and Javier Perianes give a superb account of the piece in what I have to say is an essential disc as far as these late sonatas are concerned.
Next, in 1915, came the sonata for flute, viola and harp, here played by Philippa Davies, Lawrence Power and Lucy Wakeford. The piece is marvellous, full of colour and delicacy yet illusory and characteristically ambiguous. It is my favourite of these late pieces. If Debussy was aiming to evoke those masters of the ancien régime with their trio sonatas, he succeeded, whilst injecting his own brand of enchantment and mystery. The Nash here are once again sprightly and bright, matched by clear, well-rounded sonics.
The winter of 1916/17 was a cruel one. The war ground on and shortages in food and coal started to bite. Debussy was also by now weary and fatigued in fighting the cancer he had been diagnosed with a few years previously. He found composing the violin sonata a real grind. It was to be his last work. On this record, we hear Stephanie Gonley in partnership with Alasdair Beatson. I agree with my colleague William Hedley on the merits of Isabelle Faust’s version with Alexander Melnikov on HM and would not want to be without it. But, her wispy, feathery tone down at ppp and her portamento may seem a bit much for some. The Nash version is definitely more mainstream and none the worse for that.
I didn’t mention that the Nash Ensemble have been here before. In 1991 on Virgin Classics they did the late sonatas coupled with the adorable Chansons de Bilitis. My version is on a double CD with Ravel’s chamber music. If you shop around, you might still be able to find a copy. Flautist Philippa Davies plays on both versions of the trio. This is pertinent as this latest disc is released in the season in which the Nash Ensemble celebrate 60 years together. In their own selfless way, the current disc does not mention this, but I will. To all the players, past and present members alike, bravi!
Philip Harrison
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Contents
Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1894)
Violin Sonata in G minor (1917)
Sonata for flute, viola and harp (1915)
Cello Sonata in D minor (1915)
String Quartet in G minor (1893)
