RAVEL: Ma mere l’oye–Suite; Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in D Major; DEBUSSY: La Mer – Michel Block, piano/Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra/Carlo Maria Giulini
Testament SBT 1434 65:16 [Distr. by Harmonia mundi] ****:
More delicate shades of music making from the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra archives, Carlo Maria Giulini conducting (10 January 1978). Giulini (1914-2005) brought his unique sense of color to the French repertory, of which Ravel, Debussy, Faure, and Franck comprised the essential canon. Ravel’s charmed suite in behalf of eternal childhood has Giulini tiptoeing through its meandering harmonies, occasionally pulsating with exotic life, as in Laideronnette, Imperatrice des Pagodes. Horn and cymbals barely seem to have touched their chords than they dissipate into an eternity of vapors. The tinkling-glass effect becomes translucent enough to warrant inclusion into the score for Capra’s Lost Horizon. The dialogue of Beauty and the Beast conveys a dark mystery and a palpable sense of privacy. The last movement–ever since Koussevitzky recorded it–has always said a sweet, processional farewell to childhood, the first violin (Michel Schwalbe) intoning with the harp and glockenspiel a tragedy so sweet we must smile through the tears.
Belgian virtuoso Michel Block (1937-2003) joins Giulini for the rough-hewn Concerto in D for the Left Hand. The music rises, de profundis, to accomplish any number of witty and brilliant metric and colorist coups for al participants. Block’s illusion of having performed with two hands–in two different rhythms–is so complete, we wonder at his quick articulation. In three sections, the music soon becomes Romanesque, basking in horns and piano riffs of stately repose before blasting into jazzy riffs and figures from primitive dance. Block’s textural clarity and transparency waft through the duple and triple meters, simulating a gauzy veil whose underlying energies prove quite balletic and feral. Block’s shimmering cadenza might have been carved as an ice statue, liquid and solid at once, eminently lucid. When Giulini’s BPO wades in for the coda, the result proves conclusive, to say the least.
Many auditors have credited Giulini with a thorough sympathy for “impressionism,” given Debussy’s absolute loathing for that epithet describing his music. Giulini’s rendition of La Mer, rather broad, lies between the Toscanini sea-storm and the Celibidache sea doldrums. Undulant, sensuous, the waters From Dawn till Noon at Sea caress and lull us with their promise of submerged desires. The sea spray becomes palpable as it strikes the coastline. Giulini carves huge swaths of water and rolling thunder as the cello and viola line surges forward, the sea birds as witness. We recall that Wordsworth sought to hear Old Triton’s “wreath’d horn” rather than succumb to a defunct and materialistic excuse for modern religion. The same harmonic intensity informs the mercurial swirling Play of the Waves, touched by illuminations from the BPO percussion and horns. The figures quickly becomes heraldic, tinged with both irony and sultry pantheism. The sirens truly wake us, but we do not drown, but cavort with them luxuriantly. The alchemy of water moves to the Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea, turbulent in C-sharp Minor. The inner rhythm becomes fervently obsessive, not a far cry from the internal combustion in the last movement of Schubert’s Ninth Symphony. Erotic, mystical, it shadows Wagner without recourse to Teutonic device, the BPO Karajan’s, only capable of tears. The urge to the last pages quite sweeps us away in a panoply of color forces, immense, undeniable, primal, convincing. A thrilling evening at the Philharmonie, folks.
–Gary Lemco
