Debussy: Jeux - Ravel: Rhapsodie Espagnole

Some more late Debussy with Jeux, his last and also what is generally regarded his most accomplished and enigmatic orchestral score. Originally written as 'poème dansé' for the Ballets Russes, it was premiered in 1913 by Pierre Monteux and then largely forgotten, supposedly because of its banal scenario (a boy and two girls frolic in a garden at dusk; their game is interrupted by a stray tennis ball). De Sabata recorded it for the first time in 1947 (apparently still available at Testament) and in the 1950s it started to be taken up by a number of francophone conductors (Cluytens, Ansermet, Munch, and again Monteux).

Allegedly Debussy did not like the ballet's plot, but he was ill with cancer and in debt and Dhiagilev paid him 10.000 gold francs to write the score. All of the 700 bars of Jeux were written in just a matter of three weeks in August 1913. Maybe the speed of writing helps to explain the very particular character of this piece. It is as fellow-composer Kevin Volans once wrote about how painter Philip Guston inspired him by his way of working: " ... in an effort to get away from form and into the material, he stood close up to the canvas, working quickly and not stepping back to look until the work was finished." Reflecting on his own quartet The Songlines Volans writes: "I juxtaposed very different kinds of music in the order they occured to me, not thinking ahead, and allowing the material to unfold at its own pace. If there was a 'sense of form' at work, it was covert. However, I didn't use everything that occured to me. I tried to follow Guston's suggestion of 'eliminating both that which is yours already and that which is not yet yours' - in other words, keeping only that which is becoming yours."

I feel this perfectly captures the kaleidoscopic nature of this score in which there are 60 tempo markings and in which myriads of one or two bar motives have been identified. Personally I find it a rather frigid beauty that appeals more to the intellect than to the heart. I listened to three different versions of the work: Tilson Thomas with the London SO, Boulez with the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie (part of their 3CD Jubiläums Edition) and the celebrated Haitink with the Concertgebouw Orchestra. All of them seemed to have an excellent measure of the score, with MTT infusing the music with a characteristically impressionistic sfumato (helped by an atmospheric recording from the Abbey Road Studios), and Boulez, predictably, betting everything on precision and transparency. Haitink is sitting somewhere in between. Despite the qualities of these recordings I have the feeling that there is more to this score.

The CD with the Boulez take on Jeux also includes a 1980 performance by the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie of Ravel's Rhapsodie Espagnole, this time conducted by Kyrill Kondrashin. I've known the Rhapsodie for a very long time (my dad bought a recording in the earliest days of the compact disc medium, Eduardo Mata with the Dallas SO on RCA) considering it as one of these superbly crafted but innocuous symphonic spectaculars. But this performance is of a totally different calibre than anything else I have heard of this piece. It sounds raucously contemporary (I thought it was a later piece than the Debussy Jeux but was surprised to see Ravel composed it in 1907-08 already) and conjures the kind of cataclysmic images that would flower in La Valse only fifteen years and a world war later. The recording, that was made of a live performance, is astonishingly detailed if only a little constricted in the very loudest tutti. Kondrashin and his young orchestra present the work as if every detail has been thought through, yet the music making has an athletic, feline quality that is totally appropriate. It's a spooky, monumental version of the piece that perfectly seems to capture the atmosphere of these heady days early in the previous century.