The association with the
Ballets Russes isn't all that
these scores have in common. We may think of Debussy as
"impressionist", while Schmitt's bolder scoring sounds
distinctly post-Wagnerian; but the two composers share a fluid harmonic
idiom and a knack for shaping gracefully curving motifs, particularly for
the woodwinds. To hear
Pétrouchka, in turn, in this company
underlines the Gallic clarity of its orchestral textures, busy as they
sometimes get, and of its thematic fragments.
The opening of the
Faune worried me: heavy, the flute and horn
solos are laboured, and the pause at 0:38 feels endless. After that,
however, Sylvain Cambreling fashions a spontaneous-sounding, sensuous
interpretation that gives full play to the score's shimmering
orchestral palette. There's enough breathing room in the tempos to
allow the conductor good control, notably in the tricky three-against-two
passage at 5:45, where he subtly resets the co-ordination at the start of
each new phrase. The climaxes are full and lush, but never thick.
There's an anomaly at 3:03, where the two flutes, repeating a phrase,
play an A-natural where they'd just played an A-sharp; is this some
new alternative reading, or a unison blooper?
In
Pétrouchka, Cambreling's pacing feels restrained, but
it's not slow -- just firmly grounded, in a way that allows details
of counterpoint and articulation to enrich the textures. The rhythmic
displacements at 0:48 sound nervous, but the opening paragraph is more
assured than in several higher-profile accounts (Solti/Decca,
Rozhdestvensky/Nimbus). In the "organ-grinder" episode after 2:23
all the musical elements, especially the little trills, register clearly.
The woodwinds, a bit later, have time to "place" really crisp
staccati, instead of just flicking them. At 6:05 in the Moor scene, rhythmic
bowed tremolos subtly propel things forward.
For all the conductor's attention to detail, however, his
performance has plenty of character, both musical and pictorial. The
tutti chords at 3:48 of track 7 are splashy and cheerful, while the
woodwind solos at 9:01 are tender. Bracing accents effectively mark the
shifts to the second and third tableaux; at 1:21 of track 8, woodwinds and
piano set an eerie, austere mood that's maintained as the textures
become more active. The trumpet solo in the Moor's episode is fleet:
the Ballerina is apparently an expert player. Only the closing tableau, with
the dancing bear and all, sounds routine, though lively.
La Tragédie de Salomé is similarly characterful. In the opening,
sinuous woodwind soli unfold over calm, slow string pulses. At the start of
the
Danse des perles, the pizzicatos are springy and energetic, if
a bit boomy, while the lighter contrasting episode is charming. In
Les
enchantements sur la mer, the undulating rhythms and the horn phrases
at 1:36 evoke Debussy's sea. The women's chorus that enters at
7:13 of the same movement sounds clear; when the orchestra enters,
it's firm, but light and supportive. The chords of the
Danse des
éclairs are compact and rhythmic, and turbulent
tuttis propel
the music to the finish.
Cambreling leans into the score's climaxes with a nice sweep.
Unfortunately, the engineers have allowed a couple of the percussion-heavy
ones - as early as 5:08 of the piece, and again at 6:14 of track 4 - to
sound harsh, edgy and aggressive. This sound is, simply, neither musical nor
authentic, and it spoils the production for me. It's distressing
still to be hearing this sort of thing some thirty-five years into the
digital era. Have everyone's ears - producers',
engineers', conductors' - become so de-sensitized that no-one
notices? The irony is that, in the other two works and elsewhere in this
piece, there are no such problems: the sound is full, vivid, and
"deep".
Thus, for all this programme's strengths, I can't
wholeheartedly recommend it. I was astonished, upon checking Amazon, to find
quite a few digital accounts of the Schmitt, which I don't know; for
now, I'll stick with my venerable RCA LP, with Antonio de Almeida
leading the New Philharmonia - remember the "New Philharmonia"? -
in a prosaic but rich-toned performance. The analogue era also accounts for
most of my favoured versions of the other two scores: Ansermet (Decca) and
Previn's analogue (EMI - it's
not the one reissued in
Warner's
100 Best Ballet box) in the Debussy; Ozawa (RCA),
Ansermet again (Decca) and Mehta's digital (Sony) in the
Stravinsky.
Stephen Francis Vasta
Stephen Francis Vasta is a New York-based conductor, coach and
journalist.
