DEBUSSY: Prélude a l’après-midi d’un faune; Fètes (trans. Ravel); La Mer (arr. Pascal and Ami Roge); RAVEL: Ma Mère L’Oye; Rapsodie espagnole; SAINT-SAENS: Scherzo Op. 87 – Pascal Rogé and Ami Rogé, pianos – Onyx 4117 [Distr. by Harmonia mundi], 79:08 ****1/2:
Here’s some very familiar French music but in unfamiliar garb. In some cases, the original composers have done the arranging, but in the case of Debussy’s “Impressionist symphony” La Mer, the performers themselves have fashioned the creditable arrangement.
In all this music, it is intriguing to see how the arrangers have managed the task of capturing musical effect that is so tellingly captured through the range of coloristic effects available to the orchestrator. In fact, the arrangements of both Fètes and La Mer might remind us that Ravel considered Debussy a mediocre orchestrator; he one time remarked that if he had had time, he would have reorchestrated La Mer. But then he could say snippish things even about his own music. As it turns out, Ravel in his transcription of Fètes had the task of condensing some of Debussy’s broadest orchestral gestures into the colors available to four hands playing at two pianos. Fètes is the second of three Nocturnes, named after a series of paintings by Whistler. As in the paintings, Debussy tried to capture “the various impressions and the special effects of light that the word suggests.” Fètes is concerned with “the vibrating, dancing rhythm of the atmosphere with sudden flashes of light.” Those impressions, in the original, are conveyed by a very big orchestra, with triple winds (except for two clarinets), four horns, three trumpets and trombones, tuba, two harps, and a hefty percussion section that includes timpani, piano, snare drum, and cymbals—certainly sufficient to infuse the music with those “sudden flashes of light” in the noisy central section.
Ravel’s imposing task was to capture both the “vibrating and dancing”—so readily captured by the strings, including harps, and winds—as well as those sudden flashes supplied by the orchestra at full tilt. And his transcription is a model of musical translation. Again and again, I’m struck by how well he handles effects that I admire in the original: the giddy, skirling opening music; the march-like section in which big chords in the harps set the pace, just before the explosions of the central section; and, indeed, that central section itself, where Ravel cleverly translates the clash of cymbal, the rattling of snare drum, to the keyboard.
That might have been the high point of the disc for me, except that I’m equally impressed and moved by the original version (1910) of Ravel’s Ma Mère L’Oye, one of my favorite works by the composer in its later orchestral garb. It includes musical treatments of favorite Mother Goose stories such as Sleeping Beauty and Beauty and the Beast, along with some less-well-known tales such as Laideronnette, Impératrice des Pagodes. This empress of the pagodas is portrayed in wonderful faux-oriental music that, in the orchestral version, Ravel spices up with xylophone, suspended cymbals, and tam-tam. It’s wonderful to hear how much color he manages to coax from four hands at one piano. The magical, scintillant close of the work, Le jardin féerique (“The Fairy Garden”) is just as striking in the original as in Ravel’s 1911 orchestral treatment.
With Ravel’s Rapsodie espagnole, we have an interesting case in which, again, the orchestral version followed closely on the two-piano original (1907), but the impetus for and kernel of the work goes back to a Habanera that Ravel penned in 1895. Note-writer Jeremy Nicholas speculates that “Its recycling may have had something to do with Ravel’s resentment at being accused of plagarising a passage from Debussy’s ‘La soirée dans Grenade’ from 1903 written in the same key with a habanera rhythm and a similar use of an insistent C sharp clashing against the harmonies. Ravel pointedly attached the date ‘1895’ underneath the two-piano score of the Rapsodie espangnole and the orchestral version which he prepared in the early months of 1908.” An interesting insight into the rivalry between these two great composers.
As to the arrangement of La Mer, this is apparently not the first such, at least recently; there’s one from the piano duo of John and Fiona York on the English Nimbus label. But it’s rare enough certainly for the current version to be considered special. True, the arrangement of the first movement sounds too “chordal,” and thus slightly four-square, to capture the irregular pulsing energy Debussy brought to his musical portrait of the sea from dawn to noonday (De l’aube à midi sur la mer). But I think the arrangers dealt with the later pages more effectively, and I’m impressed with the near-animal vitality they managed to convey in Dialogue du vent et de la mer.
As a very substantial encore we have the Scherzo by Saint-Saëns. Written when the composer was grieving, even suicidal, following the death of his beloved mother, the Scherzo was a surprise even to Saint-Saëns, bursting as it is with life and good humor, almost too full of musical ideas to be assigned to the simple ABA form known as scherzo. As Jeremy Nichols points out, “the opening flurry using the whole-tone scale and augmented triads is not something one would anticipate from a conventional composer in the depths of depression.” While Saint-Saëns in his later years came to be considered a musical reactionary, this work from 1888 reminds us just how impetuously unconventional he could be in his best music. In fact, I was immediately struck by how closely a repeated phrase in the work resembles one of the chief episodes in Ravel’s La Valse, a fact that Ravel would, I’m sure, angrily dismiss, at the same time issuing a jab at a composer he both disparaged and admired.
This is a special recording on a number of scores, including the novelty of the Saint-Saëns and of the arrangement of La Mer. But the playing is so wonderfully alive and virtuosic throughout that even if the music weren’t so out of the ordinary, this collection would deserve an enthusiastic critical nod. As it is, for lovers of the French Impressionists and of four-hand piano music, this disc is just about indispensable.
—Lee Passarella
