Debussy : Prélude à l'Après-midi d'un Faune
Sibelius : Pelleas and Melisande - Suite
Debussy : L'enfant prodigue
Claire Rutter, soprano
Luis Gomes, tenor
Ashley Holland, baritone
Orchestra of Scottish Opera
Stuart Stratford
The contents of Scottish Opera's Sunday Afternoon concerts would appear to be at least partly predicated by whatever opera the company is about to stage. Hence, with Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande about to open, at the end of the month, company Music Director Stuart Stratford chose for his rara avis on this occasion the early cantata L'enfant prodigue, and Sibelius's take on the same Maeterlinck play that inspired Debussy.
The concert began, however, with the Prélude à l'Après-midi d'un Faune, which was Debussy's first major orchestral work. He had found his voice well before this point, 1894, as the songs and piano works written up to then attest, but there had been little more in the way of orchestral writing - a couple of works for piano and orchestra, one or two other pieces largely forgotten these days. Faune opened up new doors, some of which would lead directly to Pelléas. The orchestra didn't quite settle into the heady sensuality of the music, but I think it was more a case of warm-up blues than anything else, because the other pieces fared better.
Sibelius's Pelleas and Melisande is incidental music, commissioned for the Finnish premiere of the Maeterlinck play, in 1905. Sibelius wrote a fair bit of incidental music in his career, and this is generally regarded as some of the best of it. The differences with the Debussy are considerable, for Debussy set the play as a Symbolist drama, exactly as Maeterlinck wrote it, whereas Sibelius's music indicates a much more human drama. If anything, it's closer to Fauré's version than anything else. (Oddly, Stratford mentioned César Franck in the list of composers inspired by Maeterlinck's play. I don't see how it's possible; Franck died three years before the premiere. Slip of the tongue, no doubt). Here, the strings had just the right degree of dark resonance, and the mood shifted swiftly and smoothy as required between the movements.
L'enfant prodigue was a student work by the 18-year old Debussy; it was the piece that finally won him the Prix de Rome, and that says a good deal about it as it is. Prestigious as it was, to win the Prix de Rome (in music, at least) had certain distinct implications, for the imposed text of the required cantata was almost invariably third-rate (not to say fourth- or fifth-!), and the jury was notoriously conservative. Candidates had to be just original enough to catch their attention in the right way, but not so much as to frighten them, something Berlioz or Ravel never quite managed to get right. In the end, Debussy would probably just as soon not have won - he was miserable in Italy - but L'enfant prodigue was his third attempt, and a carefully calculated one at that.
I'm not sure if it was unfortunate or salutary to have performed Faune before the cantata; it certainly demonstrates just how far Debussy had developed in the ten years that separate the two works. L'enfant prodigue, melodically, is quite clearly indebted to Massenet, with maybe a touch of Bizet in the orientalist melismas that ornament the dance movements of the piece. I don't know if we were hearing the first or the second version of the piece; the revision was orchestrated by André Caplet, and I did think once or twice there was a slightly unexpected sophistication to the orchestral colouring, but it could just as well have been Debussy letting us have a glimpse of his future capabilities.
Stratford once again showed us that with music for which he has a real enthusiasm, he is able to communicate it, both to the audience and to the orchestra, with glowing horns and rich strings. The trio of soloists too were vocally excellent, fine voices all, and all on top form - let's just not talk about the French, please. I found myself reading the subtitles, translating mentally, approximately, back into French, and desperately trying to pick out the relevant words from the jumble. L'enfant prodigue is not a lost masterpiece, but it is certainly worth an airing when given a performance of this calibre.
[Next : 8th February]
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