Debussy: Nocturnes

Debussy's Nocturnes is this composer's opus I likely know best. Despite having listened to it quite often over the years it has always remained a bit of a closed book to me. It's beautiful music, of course, and quite easy and pleasant to listen too. But I have never found it to really catch fire. Again, as with Jeux, it's more a matter of intellectual admiration rather than genuine enthusiasm. I think it also very difficult to pull off well as an orchestra. For the most part it is not spectacular music and top soloists (particularly in the winds) are needed to breathe life in the sparse textures. I'd love to hear a version by the Budapest Festival Orchestra who have the delicacy and strength to do something extraordinary with it. But that recording does not exist.

I listened to a couple of versions. First a very dull reading by the Los Angeles Philarmonic led by Salonen. The muffled (20-bit) recording (from Royce Hall, UCLA) did nothing to enliven an experience of stifling boredom.

Then Abbado on a beautiful single LP (in a separate box) with the Boston SO. I gave this LP a cursory listen when it came back from the KM treatment and was very much taken by the beautiful, very spacious recording. But now it struck me as being much too airy, dissolving a lot of the orchestral detail in the surrounding ambience. I compared with the corresponding version on CD which has been significantly reengineered and sounds very dry and boxy.

Another reading by Abbado can be accessed via the Berlin PO's Digital Concert Hall (striking, by the way, how very little music by Debussy has been played during the last seasons). It's a concert from 1998, when Abbado was still the orchestra's chief conductor, in the rather curious surroundings of the VASA museum in Stockholm (with the noble warship looming above the orchestra). How quaint and nerdy the Berliners looked in those days! Not a bad reading but, again, not something that gave me goosepimples.

The best experience, as could be expected, was the lauded performance by Haitink and the Concertgebouw Orchestra. This double CD with all the key orchestral works is justly regarded as a cornerstone of the Debussy discography. The sophistication of the orchestral playing is matched by a super-smooth and silky recording. And even there I remain a rather dispassionate listener.

It may well be that I will never be a genuine Debussyan. It's not an accident that it's precisely his late work that leads me to explore his work in more depth. Because a Debussy 'sonata' is, in a way, an oxymoron. His greatness lies precisely in his resistance to these conflict-driven formal templates from the past. Debussy is not a symphonist and most consciously did not want to be constrained by these forms. Instead he did not go down the path of expressionistic fragmentation but relied on a compositional strategy of 'transformational networks' "which treat the musical material as a mixture of motivic and harmonic components in a logically evolving rather than a stratified context" (Arnold Whittal quoting David Lewin in his contribution to the Cambridge Companion to Debussy). Instead of 'logically evolving' it would perhaps be better to talk about 'organically evolving' as formally and harmonically the music charts a process in which continuity and change interact. Eliott Carter spoke of "coherent, ever changing continuities". Another revealing quote from the same article, this time Whittal quoting Robert P. Morgan: "the music never degenerates into a series of pleasant yet unrelated effects, a succession of isolated musical moments; everything is held together by a tight network of melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic associations ... (nevertheless) the type of musical form he developed is more loosely connected and more 'permeable' ... than that of traditional tonal music. His conception of form as essentially 'open' in character was to have an important influence on much later twentieth-century music". In a way it's reassuring that up to this day also skilled music analysts can't find a satisfactory algorithm to decode Debussy's music. Maybe we need to convince complexity theorists and agent-based modellers to have a look, as these are scientists used to let complex, organic structures flower from modest cells.