Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet (1883-1969) led the NBC Symphony eleven times between 1948 and 1950, in which he programmed French and Swiss music in his own, highly individual, approach to national styles. A mathematician with a strong sympathy for contemporary music within a tonal syntax, Ansermet delivered performances of dynamic clarity of line, informed by a long history in ballet performance, given his work for Diaghilev. Despite his association with the music of Igor Stravinsky, Ansermet raised immediate objections to Stravinsky’s experiments in 12-tone music; in fact, he bitterly criticized the Schoenberg approach to formal structure in terms that revealed Ansermet’s racist bias.Ansermet opens with Ravel’s second suite from his 1912 “choreographic symphony” Daphnis et Chloé (17 January 1948), whose three movements celebrate a Greek idyll of pantheistic bliss, set on the island of Lesbos. The first section, Lever de jour, invokes the NBC strings and harp to play with a sensuous luster we do not hear so often with Toscanini at the helm. The extensive flute part of the Pantomime alludes to Pan’s love of Syrinx. When Daphnis professes his love to Chloé before a group of nymphs, a general, joyous dance, a bacchanale, ensues. Even as realized in impressionistic harmonies, the scoring, especially in the strings, brass and battery, assumes a vivid, explosive energy to which the NBC audience responds with eruptive enthusiasm.
Swiss composer Frank Martin wrote his Petite symphonie concertante in 1945, specifically for conductor and impresario Paul Sacher. Sacher insisted the music contain traditional instruments, and in several respects, the work sounds like a concerto with three solo instruments: harpsichord, piano, and harp. The music abounds with Bach-inspired polyphony, in addition to a unique sonority and melodic shape that owes much to the use of striking, expressive string effects. This performance, also from 17 January 1948, captures the angular beauty of the work with especial resonance, preserved in Andrew Rose’s XR remastering process. The second movement Adagio proves particularly poignant: a slow, choral march by harp and harpsichord, to which the piano adds sonic illumination. The improvisatory atmosphere continues in haunted episodes, with Sylvia Marlowe’s facile talents on the harpsichord. Suddenly, the music assumes a martial temper, to which Milton Kaye’s piano adds a decisive, percussive color and Edward Vito a glistening transparency from the harp. If we hear spirited, even manic, allusions to Ravel’s piano concertos, the effect is likely deliberate.
Debussy’s mysterious and provocative 1912 ballet Jeux, constitutes what Debussy termed for Diaghilev a poème danséthat involves two young women and one man in a series of sensual encounters during a tennis game. A prolonged rondo in brief, constantly shifting motifs in contrasting metrics, the piece becomes a challenge to assimilate, given its sixty-odd tempo changes and shifting bouts of orchestral color. Ansermet’s performance with the NBC (24 January 1948) comes soon after the premiere recording of the work by Victor de Sabata in 1947. Close to atonality in its mercurial harmonies caught in protean rhythms, the ballet manages to elude easy definition, even beyond its hundred-plus years of existence. The music disperses as mysteriously and exotically as it had compelled us to listen throughout. The NBC audience accords the performance grudging admiration.
A week later, 31 January 1948, Ansermet delivers a scintillating rendition of Ravel’s 1920 La Valse, his homage to the gilded age of the Victorian ballroom and its love of Johann Strauss. Ansermet well fulfills Ravel’s intention to have created a poème chorégraphique, a piece that whirls and swirls in ceaseless energies, especially invested with 19th century music practice of slides and portamentos. Like all of Ravel’s major orchestral dance forms, this music inevitably explodes, detonated by its own tendency to apocalyptic entropy, used up by its own exhaustion of the expressive medium. Audience response proves equally eruptive.
Disc 1 ends with the first of Debussy’s Images pour orchestra – Gigues, performed on 7 February 1948. The NBC woodwinds display their resonant alertness in this piece, which began in 1905 and did not find completion until 1912. The Gigues bear tunes from Franch and British folk music, utilizing the oboe d’amour, and pungent effects from celesta and xylophone. The kaleidoscope of colors ends seven minutes, leaving the audience impressed with the NBC Symphony’s panoply of effects.
Disc 2 opens with Ansermet’s reading (18 December 1948) of Arthur Honegger’s 1921 ballet Horace Victorieux, which later took on the appellation of a “mimed symphony.” Born in Switzerland, Honegger managed to join Les Six, a French musical group opposed to the means of Ravel and Debussy as regarding Impressionism. The tone of their compositions often assumes a sarcastic or playful ethos, a deliberate attempt to mock former musical icons and their styles. The entire harmonic syntax of the score seems influenced by the German school we associate with post-Romantic Reger, Schreker, and early Weill, rich in eerie dissonance. Darkly polyphonic at selected moments, the music sporadically allows a more transparent texture, only to reassert menace in more militant, brassy terms. If the tone of this heavy-handed, 20-minute work means to be sarcastic, it must be in the spirit of Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, a political parody with dire, moral import. The audience appears surprisingly appreciative.
Ansermet continues the same program with Ravel’s first, major orchestral score, Rapsodie Espagnole of 1908. Ravel celebrates his own Spanish heritage in four movements rich in local colors close in syntax to what Debussy achieves in his piano piece Soirée dans Granade. The A Major Prélude à la nuit enjoys a controlled, soft dynamic, music sultry and seductive. Set in a modal form of A, the Malaguena extends the exotic flavor of the suite, in ¾, a brief, evocative moment. The 2/4 Habanera no less extends the Spanish dance element, here in a drowsy atmosphere, as if Bizet’s Carmen were languidly smoking a cigarette while reminiscing. The previously subdued, under-stated energies cut loose in the concluding Feria, a 6/8 romp of color, in which the NBC brass and battery exerts its capacity for exotic beguilement. The opening chords from the Prélude à la nuit repeat, infusing the vivacious dance with the original sense of erotic mystery. Brilliant trumpet work marks the last pages of the score, the music’s rising to an almost wanton luxury. The NBC audience whoops its pleasure.
With Chabrier’s 1883 España, Ansermet solidifies the Spanish impulse in his concert of 21 January 1950. A magnificent showpiece in F Major, the work earned Mahler’s respect as “the start of moden music.” Ansermet has the NBC Symphony’s playing the work, especially the trumpets, in a Gershwinesque mode, with slides in jazzy rhythm. The vibrant energy projected by the NBC rivals the best readings from Sir Thomas Beecham, who no less relished its syncopations and clever inversions of phrase. The last page releases pure exuberance.
In 1939, Ansermet arranged the 1914 suite of piano accompaniments Debussy had created in 1901 for erotic poems by Pierre-Félix Louÿs (1870-1925), considered as part of the Decadent movement in France, his Antique Epigraphs. Ansermet performs his orchestration at the NBC concert of 28 January 1950. The sonic image of this score suffers a bit of crackle, but the slithery melodic contours of the individual songs, rife with pagan imagery and sensibility, endure. Like the melodic structure in Jeux, the music exerts small fragments or clusters at us and then retreats. A more athletic energy inhabits Pour la danseuse aux crotales. The haunted fifth entry, Pour l’égyptienne, enjoys an especial seductiveness. The last movement, thanking the morning rain, casts a programmatic yet highly impressionistic series of raindrops that mean to start the world afresh. The music rather pulsates with suggestion, and the NBC audience seems to have taken the hint.
The final selection from Pristine, the ubiquitous Iberia from Images pour orchestra, graces Ansermet’s concert of 4 February 1950. The music captures the various sense impressions of Spain, the visual, aural, and olfactory elements that, combined, equate to something Wagnerian about Debussy’s aesthetic. The evocation of Andalusia by way of insinuated Spanish rhythms remains peerless in its power to inflame the musical imagination. The transparency of texture the NBC Symphony elicits, especially in the second section, Les parfums de la nuit, proves the ensemble’s acuity of response to Ansermet’s directives. Considering how little real time Debussy spent in Spain, a few precious hours, the miracle lies in the music’s sensitivity to the sevillana impulse, rendered by a cautious oboe in the second movement. The last movement, the morning of a festival day, rather sneaks up from the perfumes of the prior movement, and suddenly the castanets’ clatter and the fever of a national, many-hued guitar strum and intoxicate us to paroxysms of pleasure. Debussy, via Ansermet and his ensemble, recall earlier motives, and the assembled panoply of excited energies explodes in unabashed, joyful splendor.
—Gary Lemco
Ansermet Conducts the NBC Symphony
RAVEL: Daphnis et Chloé Suite No. 2; La Valse; Rapsodie Espagnole;
MARTIN: Petite symphonie concertante, Op. 54;
DEBUSSY: Jeux; Six épigraphes antiques (arr. Ansermet); Images pour orchestra – No. 1 – Gigues; No. 2 – Iberia;
CHABRIER: España;
HONEGGER: Horace Victorieux
Musicians:
Sylvia Marlowe, harpsichord
Milton Kaye, piano
Edward Vito, harp
NBC Symphony Orchestra, w Ernest Ansermet
More information available through Pristine
