Debussy: La Boite à Joujoux - Mussorgsky: The Nursery

It's already a while ago that I listened to Debussy's La Boîte à Joujoux, a ballet score he wrote in 1913 and can hence count amongst his late works. I got to know this via Michael Tilson Thomas' recording on Sony, which has always charmed me. It's a very subdued score steeped in half-light in which the composer immersed himself in the mysterious and haunting fantasies so characteristic for childhood. As Debussy wrily remarked in a letter: "The soul of a doll is more mysterious than even Maeterlinck supposes; it does not readily put up with the claptrap that so many human souls tolerate." Martinon's recording with the French ORTF orchestra is really excellent and even more characterful than MTT's. It also helps that it comes on pristine vinyl.

In the booklet that accompanies the Sony recording there is a reference to Mussorgsky's song cycle The Nursery, for which Debussy reputedly had much admiration (the Debussy-Mussorgsky connection is not clear to me and I'd like to read a bit more about this). I happened to have a recording of this work on a Hyperion CD which also includes some his other, better known, cycles. It features Nikolai Demidenko at the piano and the bass Anatoli Safiulin as the vocal soloist. The latter's discography is very slim and there is very little info on him around. Anyway, I find his rendering of this cycle top drawer. These are not children's songs but psychologically sophisticated tableaux about childhood. The words are all Mussorgsky's. Safiulin engages in really very funny tantrums and histrionics as he recounts the story of the small boy that is punished because he upset Nanuchka's needle work (but he didn't do it, of course, it was the cat), or of the lad who wanted to keep his cat Sailor from devouring the canary and hurt himself in the process. The wittiest is the song about the boy who was playing in the garden when he was 'attacked' by a big beetle who subsequently dropped down for dead. Was the beetle dead or just feigning? That is the existential question with which the kid breathlessly accosts his nanny. Both texts and music come across as very sophisticated. There is certainly none of the coarseness of which Mussorgsky has been accused time and again. The cycle dates from 1870, just when the composer started to be drawn into his confrontation with Boris Godunov. I think at one point I will certainly spend much more time with this composer.

Scriabin: Promethée, Le Poème du Feu - Liszt: Prometheus - Rachmaninov: Rhapsody on a theme by Paganini - Mussorgsky: Night on the Bald Mountain

Yesterday we were invited to a concert at the Brussels Bozar with a nice VIP package: walking dinner at the residence of the British ambassador, nice seats on the first balcony, refreshments during the concert, and dessert buffet afterwards. Thank you, WE. The London Philharmonic was visiting with an enterprising programme revolving around the dyonisian and the luciferian as twin leitmotivs. I hadn't yet heard this orchestra play under their Principal Conductor Vladimir Jurowski. Nikolai Lugansky took the solo part in the Rachmaninov Rhapsody, whilst remarkably enough another soloist, Igor Levit, was seated at the keyboard in the Scriabin.

I hadn't looked in great detail at the programme so I was quite shocked when the orchestra started to play Mussorgsky's Night on the Bald Mountain in the original version. I almost didn't recognise it, so different it is from the Rimsky 'recomposition' we are used to. I wouldn't say the original is technically the better piece, but it is such a wild and wacky ride that it is a treat anyhow! I looked it up and it appears that there are only very few recorded versions of this in the catalogue (luckily there is Naxos).

I heard Lugansky live before and I must say that I am not terribly taken with his rather detached mien. The Rhapsody confirmed the kind of dispassionate virtuosity that he brings to bear on musical proceedings. He was evidently also in a hurry, egging on Jurowski who made the error to follow suit which led to Lugansky pressing on even more. The final variations were predictably breathless. All in all it didn't make much of an impression on me. It certainly didn't eclipse the timeless favourite I have on CD with Bella Davidovich at the keyboard and a fairly young Neeme Järvi at the helm of a appropriately luxuriant Concertgebouw Orchestra.

After the break we proceeded with Liszt's Prometheus. Again a novelty for me. It's one of Liszt's shorter symphonic poems that started life as an overture to a cantata based on Herder's Der Entfesselte Prometheus. It offers a characteristic potpourri of the martial, the diabolical and the exultantly maestoso. Again, I was left slightly unfulfilled by a serviceable but not a great performance. It seemed to me Jurowski was a little too cautious in a piece that should be played absolutely recklessly.

Scriabin's Poème du Feu provided an appropriately impressive finale (unfortunately without Lichtstimme). You could tell that Jurowski spent most of his rehearsal time on this hyperchromatic and harmonically supersaturated Fremdkörper. Composed in 1909/10, it signals the end of an era. Soon Bartok would branch off and start to use folk music to revitalise Western art music. Just a year before, Schoenberg had written his first composition without any key (the thirteenth song of his Buch der Hängenden Gärten). And in that same year, Strauss would return from the brink of atonality with his neoclassicist Rosenkavalier. Scriabin's music sounds like a iridescent cloud, hovering above the orchestra in an unpredictable swirl of contraction and expansion and slowly edging towards that concluding and liberating F-sharp major triad. The choir, who came all the way down from Latvia, had only a few minutes of vocalisation to contribute. It's a splendid extravaganza that defies all notions of cost-effectiveness.

All in all an interesting evening with very good rather than great music making. The LPO is a fine orchestra, but not in the class of top-flight bands as, say, the Budapest Festival Orchestra. It lacks the last ounce of refinement and poise but produces an attractive, slightly husky and gritty tone. Maybe the Henry Le Boeuf Hall at the Bozar is not optimal to showcase this particular orchestra's qualities.
I can't really make up my mind about what sort of conductor Jurowski is. After the concert he spoke at length at the ambassador's residence about the programme (omitting one interesting tidbit about the Poème du Feu, namely that Scriabin started to work on it whilst he was living in Brussels). Evidently he is someone who is also interested in a conceptual grasp on the music. He is certainly to be commended to insist on adventurous programming beyond the ambit of traditional subscription concerts.