I
have been declaring for some time that the most significant Debussy
cycles in the making were those by Ogawa and Bavouzet. With the
issue of Ogawa’s fifth disc – one of my 2011
Records of the
Year – her cycle was to all effects complete. Here it is boxed
together with a sixth disc, of which more below. Given the offer
of six discs for the price of two, this seems to me the best modern
cycle to buy. Furthermore, it contains something like three hours’
more music than earlier cycles such as those by Gieseking and
Monique Haas, which stuck to the official “canon” of works. The
Debussy piano music catalogue has been getting increasingly blurry
at the edges. Indeed, Bavouzet misses – as of now – a few things
included by Ogawa, but includes piano versions of the ballets
Khamma and
Jeux.
A recent transfer of the Gieseking cycle on Regis prompted me
to make a detailed comparison between Ogawa and Gieseking in all
the “canonical” works. Did we still need Gieseking after all these
years? I concluded that, in ten pieces, he remains unassailable.
In all the rest Ogawa equalled, and sometimes surpassed him.
I will refer readers to that
review
for the “canonical” works and will discuss here the pieces not
recorded by Gieseking. I have not reread my original reviews of
the separate Ogawa issues so readers with nothing better to do
can amuse themselves looking for discrepancies. Obviously, one’s
reaction will modify over time.
CD 1 contains no “non-canonical” works but
CD 2
has the substantial addition of the so-called “
Images oubliées”.
Written in 1894 these are an astonishing advance on the salon
pieces Debussy had been writing around 1890-92. Only the central
Souvenir de Louvre was published, in 1896, entitled
Sarabande.
With this same title it resurfaced as the middle movement of
Pour
le Piano in 1901. For the composition student the tiny adjustments
of harmony and texture are fascinating. But for the less specialized
listener, well acquainted with the later version, the two obvious
differences will be that the magical bare octaves near the beginning
were harmonized back in 1894 and that the final cadence is approached
differently. He may wonder if he really needs to hear the piece
twice over.
The third piece, too, uses familiar themes – they resurfaced,
this time, in
Jardins sous la pluie. Here, though, the
actual use is rather different, possibly more experimental than
convincing. That leaves the untitled first piece as an extraordinarily
abstracted masterwork, prophetic of much that was to come at least
two decades later.
I’m not sure who was the first pianist to record this triptych
– could it have been Livia Rev? – but since its publication in
1976 it has usually been included in Debussy cycles. I’ve compared
Ogawa with Thiollier and Bavouzet.
In the first piece Thiollier takes Debussy’s instruction –
Lent
(mélancolique et doux) – at its word. He draws the music out
a minute longer than the other two. His timeless, disembodied
meditation, almost a pre-echo of Messiaen, seems to find the most
in it. Bavouzet injects a degree of romantic passion that some
will like more than I do. Though close to Bavouzet’s timing, Ogawa
finds more of the mystery and poetry of the score.
In the
Sarabande it is Thiollier and Bavouzet who are closest
in timing and concept. I find them both somewhat unsettled, proving
that a swifter-flowing tempo will work only if you can do it with
the Olympian calm Gieseking managed in the later version of the
piece. Ogawa gave it a Mahlerian expansiveness in its
Pour
le Piano incarnation. Here, recorded a few months later, she
adds a very few seconds more. However, with exquisite tonal shading
and never-heavy textures, hers is actually the version in which
time seems to pass more quickly.
Thiollier is slowest in
Nous n’irons plus au bois. His
tentative approach – deliberately, I am sure – gives the impression
of something glimpsed but not quite come into focus. Since, from
the point of view of Debussy’s own development, this is precisely
what the music is, this approach has its uses. Faster by a minute,
Bavouzet’s bold, virtuosic approach makes the piece a viable concern
on its own terms. I’m not sure that Ogawa – halfway between them
in her timing – quite manages that, but she does find some cheeky
humour and, as is her wont, coaxes out poetry where it is to be
found.
The unhelpful conclusion seems to be that, of the three performances,
each one has the best version of one of the three movements.
The one “extra” work in
CD 3 is the tiny
Morceau de
Concours. In the competition in question, 6 brief pieces were
published anonymously in the January 1905 issue of the magazine
Musica. Readers were invited to guess the composers. The
results appeared in the April issue – other composers participating
were Massenet, Saint-Saëns and Chaminade. Debussy’s contribution
was actually a recycling of material for an opera on Poe’s
The
Devil in the Belfry which never got beyond a few fragmented
sketches. We are not told how many readers identified the Debussy
piece, if any. Perhaps deliberately, it is uncharacteristic in
its abrasive drollery.
Thiollier despatches it too swiftly to make any impression. Bavouzet
and Ogawa both appreciate that
Assez animé et très rythmé
doesn’t necessary have to be all that speedy. Their clear, observant
performances are virtually interchangeable.
The extra-canonical portion of
CD 4 is more substantial.
First two brief items which Debussy contributed in 1915 as manuscripts
to be auctioned for charities connected with the war.
The
Pièce pour l’oeuvre du “Vêtement du blessé” is a gentle
little waltz. Like
La plus que lente, it has many detailed
indications for changes of tempo. Ogawa treats these with a certain
restraint and would seem to have reason since such a short piece
risks falling apart if the tempo changes are not conceived as
variations of one single tempo. On a bar-by-bar basis Bavouzet
offers much refined pianism and indeed Thiollier, who exaggerates
the changes even more, has some beautiful moments.
Bavouzet takes much more time than either of the others over the
Elégie, finding in it an expression of genuine, numbed
grief. Ogawa is also interesting, her grief more stylized, and
appreciative of the bluesy harmonies. Thiollier is a little confused,
with a couple of poorly-managed pedal-releases.
La Boîte à Joujoux was intended as a ballet score. It was
completed by Debussy in short piano score, including a detailed
synopsis of the action. He never finished the orchestration, which
was completed by Caplet. With some composers a short score might
mean an orchestral score sketched out on two staves, with no attempt
at making it effective as piano music. Debussy’s short score,
maybe because he thought firstly in pianistic terms, maybe because
he knew that a piano version would have been needed at some stage
if only for rehearsals, is pianistically perfectly viable. So
we can hear the music in two ways: in the piano version which
is all Debussy’s work and in the orchestral version that is partly
Caplet’s work, though probably fairly close to what Debussy himself
would have provided.
Earlier cycles of Debussy’s piano music ignored
La Boîte à
Joujoux, presumably on the grounds that it was not intended
as piano music. In whatever form, it has not been one of Debussy’s
most loved works even by his admirers. I went along with this
until I heard Ogawa’s version for the first time. Her range of
colour, characterization and sheer imagination put the piece on
the map for me. This time I had a score to hand and can only add
to my former comments my admiration for the precision with which
every nuance is observed. This really is consummate artistry.
There is also a substantial amount of non-canonical Debussy in
CD 5, three of the works discovered too recently for inclusion
in Thiollier’s cycle.
The history of the
Etude retrouvée would not seem to reflect
much credit on Debussy scholars. It had always been known that
a manuscript sketch entitled
Pour les arpèges composés
existed. Since this is also the title of the “official” eleventh
étude it was always supposed that it was another sketch
for this same piece. But until recently nobody actually looked
to see … It now appears that Debussy worked concurrently on two
quite different pieces addressing the same technical problem,
and then chose the other one for inclusion in the set of
12
Etudes. Curiously, the
Etude retrouvée is in a style
that would have sat uneasily with its proto-modernist companions,
a harp-like piece in a somewhat post-Fauré vein, with leanings
even towards Rachmaninov-type romanticism. Ogawa’s enchantingly
delicate performance assuredly tells one side of its story. I
wondered if its romantic side might be given fuller vent and would
like to know what Bavouzet, whose version I don’t know, has made
of it.
The
Intermède takes us back to the very beginning of Debussy’s
composing career. It is a transcription, perhaps by Debussy himself,
of the middle movement of a Piano Trio. Like the
Danse bohémienne,
with which it is approximately contemporary, it suggests that
a future might have been predicted at that time for Debussy as
a composer of ballet music after the manner of Delibes. Ogawa
plays it with grace and warmth. I doubt if anything of more moment
could be extracted from this very agreeable trifle, of which this
seems to be the only recording for now.
The
Epigraphes antiques recycle music originally written
in 1900-1 to accompany a recitation of some of Pierre Louÿs’
Chansons
de Bilitis. An ensemble of two flutes, two harps and celesta
was used. The music is unrelated to the better-known set of three
songs with the same title. In 1914 Debussy reworked some of the
pieces to make a suite for piano duet. The austere, pared-down
textures enabled him to make a solo piano version the following
year which retained most of the notes.
Thiollier offers a traditionally impressionist Debussy, misty
and generously pedalled. Ogawa aims for greater clarity. On the
first page of no. 1, her genuinely staccato left hand shows what
the differences will be. In no. 5 she makes skilled use of the
third pedal to keep the lower textures sustained while the melody
is completely clean. Thiollier uses the more usual Debussy technique
of half-pedalling and vibrato pedalling to obtain a compromise
where the sustained textures are fairly well sustained and the
melody is a little clouded but not too much so. A case might be
made for preferring Thiollier. However, he cannot convince us
that the Debussy we know and love is quite present in these pieces.
Ogawa’s more modernist approach claims independent expressive
ground for them.
Les soirs illuminés par l’ardeur du charbon was only discovered
in 2001. A gift to Debussy’s coal merchant, who managed to find
him some precious coal during the harsh, war-torn winter of 1916-17,
it was the composer’s last composition. It makes a number of references
to earlier works. Bavouzet seems to have been first in the field
with a recording, anticipating Ogawa by less than a year. He gives
an austere reading, in line with late Debussy. When the sad central
melody gets under way Ogawa caresses it more movingly, surely
to its advantage.
CD 6 is new and, as of now, available only as part of the
set. The latest – and final? – discovery in the solo piano line
is the
five fugues, one incomplete, written by Debussy
in 1881-83, three as exercises for the Conservatoire, the other
two as part of his application for the Prix de Rome. The Conservatoire
ones had the fugue subjects provided by the current director,
Ambroise Thomas, and very nondescript they are too. For the 1882
Prix de Rome fugue, the theme had been provided by Gounod. With
a small chromatic twist, it offered entrants a slightly more interesting
challenge. The fugues were to be conceived in abstract, that is
to say not for any specific instrument, though the possibility
was reserved for the better ones to be heard on the piano before
the examiners passed their final judgement. It’s curious that
the Conservatoire fugues begin immediately with at least two voices
– presumably this is what the examiners wanted. The Prix de Rome
ones begin like normal fugues. If you want proof that the young
Debussy could write academic fugues as uninteresting as the next
man’s, here it is. I suggest you listen standing up, as it’s less
easy to doze off in that position. Ogawa plays them with warm
tone and clear part-writing. I suppose a solution could have been
to play them as fast as possible and so maybe bamboozle the listener
into finding an exciting build-up that would be the performer’s
not the composer’s. Ogawa just lets them flow gently. You may
find them useful as a “guess-who-wrote-this” game to try on friends.
The
Fantaisie is obviously a more serious matter, though
it’s still very early Debussy, succulent but not very memorable.
Ogawa plays it very nicely but I wondered if the orchestra was
not excessively languid at times.
This is fair enough if you didn’t collect any of the earlier Ogawa
volumes and are now buying all six for the price of two. If you’ve
already got the basic five, you’re hardly going to want to pay
the price of two CDs to get just one more 48-minute one, half
of which you may not listen to twice. And if issued separately,
this latest offering is not very competitive since to all intents
and purposes it just has the
Fantaisie. Bavouzet’s performance
of the
Fantaisie – which I haven’t heard – comes with the
two Ravel concertos and some rare Massenet solo pieces. The drawback
there is that you’ve probably got a favourite recording of the
Ravel G major at least. I would suggest that, for a separate issue,
BIS should drop the fugues and get Ogawa to do some more French
works with orchestra, such as Fauré, D’Indy and Roussel.
The CDs come with informative notes by Leif Hasselgren, on which
I’ve drawn for some of the information above, and a synopsis of
La Boîte à joujoux.
Christopher Howell
Track list
CD 1 [75:08]
2 Arabesques (1890) [8:56], Danse (Tarantelle styrienne) (1890)
[5:09], Ballade (1890) [7:26], Valse romantique (1890) [3:22],
Rêverie (1890) [5:02], Suite bergamasque (1890-1905) [18:04],
Mazurka (1890) [2:55], Nocturne (1892) [6:21], Danse bohémienne
(1880) [2:08], Pour le piano (1894-1901) [14:20]
CD 2 [73:28]
Images (1
re série) (1905) [15:55], Images (2
e
série) (1907) [15:31], Images (oubliées) (1894) [14:09], Estampes
(1903) [14:52], Masques (1904) [5:10], L’Isle joyeuse (1904) [6:00]
CD 3 [73:28]
Préludes (1
re livre) (1909-10) [42:09], D’un cahier
d’esquisses (1904) [4:36], Pièce pour piano (Morceau de concours)
(1905) [0:48], Hommage à Haydn (1909) [2:27], The Little Nigar
(1909) [1:42], Children’s Corner (1906-08) [17:11], La plus que
lente (1910) [5:05]
CD 4 [79:37]
Préludes (2
e livre) (1911-12) [37:57], Berceuse héroïque
(1914) [3:58], Pièce pour l’œuvre du Vêtement du blessé (Page
d’album) (1915 [1:11], Elégie (1915) [1:54], La Boîte à joujoux
(1913) [33:04]
CD 5 [81:42]
Etudes (1915) [49:51], Etude retrouvée (1915) [5:13], Intermède
(1880/82) [4:05], 6 Epigraphes antiques (1914-15) [1907], Les
Soirs illuminés par l’ardeur du charbon (1917) [2:05]
CD 6 [48:54]
5 Fugues d’école (1881-83) [23:01], Fantaisie for piano and orchestra
(1889-90) [24:40]
Noriko Ogawa (piano) (all works) 
