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.

Granados, Turina, Guridi, Montsalvatge: Canciones Espanolas

It's been a long while since I have listened to vinyl, but as I am only messing a little bit around, without, for the time being, a fixed listening perimeter in mind, I picked up this attractively 1970s specimen from a 'KM-treated' box. It stayed in my mind after JD had played a few tracks when I picked up the LP after the cleaning treatment. (I also think Pristine's newsletter with a report on Andrew Rose's visit to the Albeniz museum has something to do with my Spanish leanings). After careful listening I can indeed confirm that it is a marvel of a recording. The good news is that I picked up for 1 euro from the bargain bin in a Brussels second hand vinyl shop ...

The repertoire was all but unknown to me. A series of Spanish songs from composers I mostly hadn't heard about. Granados, certainly, but Montsalvatge, Guridi, and even Turina didn't ring much of a bell. The first side starts with a collection of three older songs - from the 16th to 18th century - where the lute accompaniment has been transcribed for piano. Beautiful, noble songs, drenched in that characteristic Iberian idiom. Granados fills the remainder of this LP side with 6 tonadillas. This is serious music, almost Mahlerian in its mixture of folksiness and expressionistic anguish. Side two continues with three colourful, masterfully impressionistic Turina songs, of which the darkly shaded El Fantasma stands out. Then three lively songs by Basque composer Jesus Guridi (who was cosmopolitan enough to write Seis canciones castellanas). The lines are more clearly etched here compared to the Turina.

Let us pause for a minute and ask who Jesus Guridi was anyway? Wikipedia learns that he lived a long (1886-1961) and fairly prolific life and was known as 'the' Basque composer during his lifetime. Interestingly he spent two years in Brussels studying with Joseph Jongen. His output covers both instrumental and vocal music (notably famous zarzuela) and is well represented in the Naxos catalogue. There is a 1946 Sinfonia Pyrenaica which sounds superbly colourful and accomplished and is going straight on my list of 'to buy'! Now I'd like to find his Homenaje a Walt Disney for piano and orchestra (there's a recording on the Claves label, now deleted, that can be found used).

The recital ends with a delightful collection of 6 Canciones Negras by Xavier Montsalvatge. Here Antillian echoes abound. The Cancion de cuna para dormir a un negrito is a truly delightful lullaby and seems to be a fixture in Spanish female singers' repertoires. The final song Canto Negro is a funny and virtuoso finale to a superbly entertaining recital.

What pulls this collection to an altogether stratospheric level is the very special voice of Teresa Berganza. She was 40 when the recital was taped in 1975 and at the peak of her career. It was two years later that she sang the title role in the still famous Carmen taped by DGG under Abbado. Admittedly not everyone is equally enamoured by the rather patrician slant she gives to the role. But that she was a singer of impeccably cultured artistry is undeniable. Here, on this LP, it is difficult to imagine more accomplished renderings of these songs. They just sound perfect, the voice being in total command. It's a masterful blend between intellectualism, poetry and visceral passion. The singer is marvelously accompanied by Felix Lavilla, who happened to be her husband for 20 years and fathered Berganza's three children. However, they divorced just two years after this recording and it looks like this wasn't a happy marriage at all (Here is a 1985 interview where she confided that she was in her second marriage " – the first was to a pianist, and a marriage between two artists is very difficult.  It was Carmen that liberated me from being the slave of the pianist."). 

Finally, the attractive repertoire, the marvelous voice and the beautiful accompaniment are splendidly put into relief by a remarkable recording. The LP sounds absolutely great. The voice is presented with beguiling fluidity and 'naturel'. The piano sounds as it should: 'metal and wood'. There's staggering dynamics in these grooves. And all this with a fairly simple Goldring Eroica. Admittedly, the soundstage is fairly compact and the stylus is not able to dig out the lowest frequencies. But that suits this kind of music fairly well. Whilst I certainly look forward to the day that I can listen to this with a more sophisticated element this LP has given me already much pleasure.

To end just two more quotes from the Bruce Duffy interview:

I like giving recitals because there is more light.  There is eye-contact between the singer and every member of the audience, even in a huge house with maybe 3000 people.  I’ve been giving recitals, and I am aware that way in the back there is one man who is not paying attention, who is not interested in what I am singing, and I can make him listen.  I can look at him and work on him (or her) until he’s awake.  More often, though, it is a “him.”  And, of course, when it is a “him,” it is easier to get him back.  [laughter]

I think that the kind of performances that are being offered to audiences nowadays is worse than it used to be.  I had an extraordinary stroke of luck that my career happened at the time that it did.  I began my career on the stage working with great conductors like Abbado and Giulini and Solti, and great stage-directors like Ponnelle and Zeffirelli.  This was a period when all the singers worked to create the very best possible performance of that music and the greatest possible theatrical portrayal of the characters, and this was arrived at because the rehearsal periods were a lot longer than they are now.  In the old days there used to be 25 days worth of rehearsals before the show took place, and during that time we worked very hard.  There were 4 or 5 rehearsals with orchestra plus a pre-dress rehearsal and a dress rehearsal.  So, with that kind of preparation, the performances came off in a way that is probably no longer possible.  Now, in the places where I go, the rehearsals are a week or 10 days before the show opens, and there are many singers who don’t even like to give that much!  They’d like to come a couple of days before the show, sing their performance, pick up their check and go on to the next city where they do the same thing again.  Since this is becoming more and more wide-spread as a practice, I believe that the performances being given nowadays are not of a quality that they used to be.