Debussy: Ibéria - Turina: Danzas Fantasticas and other orchestral works

It's holiday period and we are at my parents' place in France. Time to catch up with some reading, movie watching and listening. First I checked what music of Debussy my dad has in his CD collection. Which is not a lot. One of the few discs is an early digital recording (1981) on the Telarc label, featuring the Mexican maestro Eduardo Mata and his Dallas Symphony Orchestra in Debussy's Ibéria. This is one of his most celebrated orchestral scores. It's a tryptich within the larger tryptich of the Images pour orchestre, written between 1905 and 1912. I must confess that this is not the Debussy that I really love. The music is colourful and brilliantly evocative but to my mind it misses the epic sweep that is characteristic for the late works.

Anyway I passed some enjoyable hours comparing three versions with one another. The Mata recording I liked a lot. It's a broad and spacious reading but very, very polished. Maybe the last movement - Le matin d'un jour de fêtes - should have had a little more fire. Anyway the Dallas SO were a splendid body of musicians at that time and their artistry has been beautifully captured by the then revolutionary Soundstream technology. It's a very airy and detailed, but also weighty and balanced sound. Telarc has never done better than in those early years of digital. That is all too obvious when we compare the 1981 recording with a recent issue in SACD format on the same label. This time it is Jesus Lopez-Cobos with the Cincinatti SO in his valedictory recording in 2001 with the orchestra after more than two decades as chief conductor. The sound is flat and lifeless and whatever the qualities of the orchestral playing, they are not able to shine. I really get very annoyed when I hear this kind of anesthetised sound reproduction. There must be logic - commercial or otherwise - behind this progressive erosion of recording quality but it eludes me.

The third and last version is a 1952 recording with the Grand Orchestre Symphonique de l'INR (otherwise known as the Belgian National Radio Symphony Orchestra) conducted by Franz André, available for download via the Pristine Classical website. This was a very pleasant discovery, and proof of the fact that fifty years ago we had orchestras in our country that could compete at an international level. Franz André, who had been leading the orchestra from the 1920s onward, recorded a significant body of work issued as Telefunken LPs. The orchestra was also famous for giving premieres of important new works. Unbelievably enough NIR orchestra gave the first European performance of Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra in Paris and the first West European performance of the Fourth Symphony by Shostakovich. The Debussy recording has been expertly restored by Pristine's Andrew Rose from an original Telefunken LP, pressed in the UK by Decca. It's a great performance, very animated and tense, quite the opposite of the approach taken by Eduardo Mata. But despite the less sophisticated sonics (still very good though) it is an equally enjoyable experience.

I also listened to the orchestral works by Joaquin Turina that complemented Debussy's Iberia on the Lopez-Cobos disc: the three Danzas Fantasticas (op. 22), the Sinfonia Sevillana (op. 23) and the earlier Procesion del Rocio (op. 9). All very colourful aural postcards from Spain but nothing to my mind that really jumps out. The Sinfonia Sevillana is a collection of three tone poems - similar to Ibéria - rather than a work that is underpinned by a unifying symphonic logic. The most engaging piece, maybe, is the Procesion which raucously winds its way through the streets of Seville every year just before Christmas.