Claude DEBUSSY (1862–1918)
Debussy Orchestrated
Petite Suite (orch. Büsser) (1886–1889) [14:29]
La boîte à joujoux (orch. Caplet) (1913) [31:41]
Children’s Corner (orch. Caplet) (1906–1908) [18:04]
Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire/Pascal Rophé
rec. 7–8 January 2021; Centre de congrès, Angers, France
BIS RECORDS BIS-2622 SACD [65:07]
The same man who famously put down Fauré as a “master of charms” also declared on another occasion that “pleasure is the law.” Was the latter a defiant stand against cob-webbed orthodoxies or tacit admission that he also knew a thing or two about beguiling his audience?
As this new BIS release of Debussy (by way of Büsser and Caplet) demonstrates, the composer may have meant to have it both ways. In La boîte à joujoux, his Bolshevik and bourgeois sides sit hand-in-hand, watching over the puppet show antics which slyly wink at the poignant human truths intimated by the score’s prefatory note: “Toy boxes are a kind of city in which toys live like people. Or, rather, maybe cities are just toy boxes in which people live like toys.” Mathilde Serraile reminds the listener in her fine liner notes that the seductive charm of much of Debussy’s music makes it easy to forget that he was also a revolutionary (albeit one with a knack for propitiously ingratiating himself). Vestiges of his insurgent muse are palpable even in the perennially beloved (and stylistically uncharacteristic) Petite Suite, with its evanescent whisper of a whole-tone scale in “En bateau” and evocations of Verlaine’s concupiscent verses in the titles of its opening two movements. More obvious is the proto-surrealist jeering of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in Children’s Corner—a real sniper’s rifle emerging improbably from a child’s playroom foxhole.
Led here by music director Pascal Rophé, the Orchestre national des Pays de la Loire favor neither Debussy the charmer nor the iconoclast. Delicate yet never epicene, transparent yet never clinical, they are like Bashō's haiku manifested in sound: “Orchid—breathing/incense into/butterfly’s wings.” The orchestra’s wind soloists are especially delightful (listen to the subtly plangent tartness of the solo oboe in “The Little Shepherd”). BIS presents the orchestra within a satisfyingly roomy acoustic that imparts a warming plushness to the mid-range and bass.
For lovers of Debussy (and French music), these suave performances of some of the composer’s most enduringly alluring music will be impossible to resist.
Néstor Castiglione
