Qbaîrmwphvn STEREO 439 896-2 Em DEBUSSY- LA MER • NOCTURNES Jeux - Rhapsodie pour clarinette et orchestre The Cleveland Orchestra • Pierre Boulez WD 1 m 0 CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862-1918) m>x h CO O) Nocturnes O r 00 G) 28943 98962 00 m I. Nuages [6Ï5] Modéré - Un peu animé HO DIGITAL • STEREO x m II. Fêtes [6’31] m ro Animé et très rythmé - Modéré mais toujours très rythmé 439896-2 o£ III. Sirènes [9’40] Modérément animé m (avec chœur de femmes/with women’s chorus/mit Frauenchor/con coro femminile) £2 The Cleveland Orchestra Chorus o m (Chef de chœur/Chorus Master / Einstudierung / Maestro deI coro: Gareth MorellJ O* 3 z s x O Première Rhapsodie* [8’33] @)IdTdTd1 m o pour orchestre avec clarinette principale AUDIO RECORDING SU p LU _l Rêveusement lent A new dimension in clarity and realism * O FRANKLIN COHEN, clarinet ^ m 0) ffi 00 C/> LU ^ O • m Jeux [16*03] r~ m m c SÉ Poème dansé Nx O LU Très lent - Scherzando (Tempo initial) o x zo . X oc O La Mer LU o Trois esquisses symphoniques 2 Z 33 I. De l’aube à midi sur la mer [8’45] —..1 LUMl Très lent m II. Jeux de vagues [7’06] 3<-> Allegro (dans un rythme très souple) 00W XLU III. Dialogue du vent et de la mer [7’41] O I- Animé et tumultueux -P» CO CO 00 The Cleveland Orchestra • PIERRE BOULEZ Cover Illustration: Pham van My CO u O CT) < LU Manufactured and Marketed by t Œ PolyGram Classics & Jazz, (5 [U * |D|D|D| • ©1995 Deutsche Grammophon GmbH, Hamburg • [70’58] a Division of PolyGram Records, ÛCO Inc., New York, NY 1 Photo: Charlotte Oswald 439 896-2 Œ CLAUDE DEBUSSY (I862-1918) Nocturnes LD 1. Nuages [6T5] Modéré - Un peu animé ® II. Fêtes [6’31] Animé et très rythmé - Modéré mais toujours très rythmé E III. Sirènes [9’40] Modérément animé (avec chœur de femmes / with women’s chorus / mit Frauenchor / con coro femminile) The Cleveland Orchestra Chorus (Chef de chœur/Chorus Master/Einstudierung/Maestro de1 coro: Gareth MorellJ E Première Rhapsodie* [8'33] pour orchestre avec clarinette principale Rêveusement lent FRANKLIN COHEN, clarinet [I] Jeux [16’03] Poème dansé Très lent - Scherzando (Tempo initial) La Mer Trois esquisses symphoniques E 1. De l’aube à midi sur la mer [8’45] Très lent E II. Jeux de vagues [7’06] Allegro (dans un rythme très souple) E III. Dialogue du vent et de la mer [7-41] Animé et tumultueux The Cleveiand Orchestra • PIERRE BOULEZ * 1DIDIDI • ® 1995 Deutsche Grammophon GmbH, Hamburg • [70’58] 0501 CLAUDE DEBUSSY to commit itself to any tune, and only gradually do held high, bounds across. He disappears ... Then the thèmes gain power, through passages of un- two girls corne on, fearful and curious. They seem NOCTURNES • LA MER • JEUX • RHAPSODIE precedented intricacy. The centrepiece, in its to be looking only for somewhere to exchange hesitancy and constant change, looks forward to confidences. They start to dance, one after the Jeux. And though the finale is, as its title says, a other. Suddenly they stop, disconcerted by the The subjects of the three main works here are Sirènes is a seascape, in which the sirens appear dialogue, it works not so much with different mo¬ noise of disturbed leaves. The young man is to be perhaps different metaphors for the freedom as wordless voices. tives as with different approaches to music and to seen, his gaze following their movements from the that was Debussy’s principal wish for his music. Debussy’s sea music, lapping around the edges of life: it is a dialogue of spontaneity and planning. branches. They make to leave. But he brings them Just as, in the night, our dependence on our ears Pelléas, reached its apotheosis in the composition Jeux, Debussy’s last orchestral work, is the end of back tactfully and persuades one of them to dance brings us the world in less solid and particular he began in 1903, the year following the opera’s one journey and the beginning of another, in that it with him; he even steals a kiss. The spite or jeal- form, so in the Nocturnes we receive fragmentary completion: La Mer. He seems to hâve started was a principal key to the music of the next gén¬ ousy of the other girl sets off an ironie, mocking and sometimes conflicting messages. In La Mer, work during a summer in Burgundy - far from the ération but one: for Boulez it marked “the arrivai of dance {2/a) and draws the attention of the young the sea is a measure of musical forces that are actual sea, as he noted in a letter to André Mes¬ a kind of musical form which, renewing itself from man: he invites her into a waltz (3/e), which he unstable and unpredictable. And Jeux flows with sager. “But I hâve innumerable memories, and moment to moment, implies a similarly instantane- leads, the girl following him at first mockingly, then games played out by instruments, harmonies, those, in my view, are worth more than a reality ous mode of perception”. The work was written in letting herself be captivated by the charm of the thèmes. Such freedom had to be worked for. De¬ which, charming as it may be, tends to weigh too 1912-13 for a ballet by Nijinsky, and a subséquent dance. But the first girl, abandoned, makes to bussy wrote to his publisher that the Nocturnes heavily on the imagination.” Of Fêtes, likewise, he programme note, in which Debussy may well hâve leave. The other restrains her (3/4, très modéré) had given him more trouble than his opéra Pelléas had written to Paul Dukas that the music “was had a hand, connects the musical events with with tender insistence, and the dance becomes a et Mélisande, and indeed the project seems to based, as always, on distant memories”, this time those of Nijinsky’s tennis-party scénario. threesome (3/s), growing more and more excited hâve woven itself through his thoughts for several of a festival in the Bois de Boulogne. It was not that “After a préludé of a few bars, very slow, soft and up to a moment of eestasy, interrupted by another years before the score was finished, in 1899 - five he was against évocation - he balked when the dreamy, where a sustained tonie B in the violins is falling lost tennis bail, which causes the three years after his previous orchestral piece, the Pré¬ critic Pierre Lalo, at the first performance of La Mer the background for the various inversions of the young people to flee: the chords of the préludé re¬ in 1905, failed to “see or smell the sea” in the piece lude à l’après-midi d’un faune. Along the way, chord formed from ail the notes of the whole-tone turn; a few notes still slip by furtively, and it is ail fascinating possibilities were discarded: a violin - but music for him was rooted in memory, not di¬ scale, there appears a first scherzando motif, in 3/a, over.” concerto entitled Scènes au crépuscule-, a work, rect expérience. soon interrupted by the return of the préludé, this A lyrical envoi: the Première Rhapsodie (there was again with solo violin, where the orchestra would Besides the power of the sea, La Mer may convey time underlined by rumblings low in the strings; no deuxième) was composed in 1909-10 as a that of the composer at a time when his opéra had consist of strings in the first movement, of flûtes, then the scherzando starts again with a second Conservatoire test piece (for the annual practical brass and harps in the second, and of both groups brought him prestige, and when he had renewed motif. At this point the action begins: the bail falls exams) and orchestrated in 1911. in the third. Yet shadows of these shadows remain his private life by leaving his wife to take up with onto the stage; a young man in tennis kit, racket Paul Griffiths in what emerged. Nuages, with its cor anglais (Eng- the moneyed and talented Emma Bardac: their lish horn) solo and oscillating chords remembered child was born in the month of the work’s première. ^5)lDlD|D| . * (dTdTdI from a Mussorgsky song, the composer described La Mer is the most public in tone of his orchestral AUDIO RECOROING 1—'—' as rendering “the slow, solemn motion of clouds” works, the only important one to end emphatically, Recording: Cleveland, Masonic Auditorium, 3/1991 (Rhapsodie)* & 3/1993 (another image of the unfixed). “Fêtes gives us vi¬ the only one to retain links with conventional form Executive Producer: Roger Wright; Alison Ames (Rhapsodie) brant atmosphère, with sudden flashes of light”, that justify the subtitle, “three symphonie Recording Producer: Karl-August Naegler • Tonmeister (Balance Engineer): Helmut Burk Recording Engineers: Klaus Behrens / Stephan Flock; Rainer Maillard/Andrew Wedman (Rhapsodie) and with a procession “which passes through the sketches”. Even so, the first movement is far from ©1995 Deutsche Grammophon GmbH, Hamburg festive scene and becomes merged into it.” Finally, an orthodox sonata allegro. It begins as if unwilling © 1995 Paul Griffiths Cover Illustration: Pham van My, c/o Margarethe Hubauer • Art Direction: Hartmut Pfeiffer THE 4 TECHNICAL DIMENSIONS: @)[DlDTDl Remote-controlled microphone pre-amplifier AUDIO RECORDING Deutsche Grammophon has designed its own low-interference PIERRE BOULEZ ON DEUTSCHE GRAMMOPHON microphone pre-amplifier which, with a minimum of noise and dis- tortion, augments the analogue signal from the microphone.