The most significant musical anniversaries of 2018 are all centenaries – of the births of Leonard Bernstein and Bernd Alois Zimmermann, and of the death of Claude Debussy, and it’s the last of those, which falls in March, that is attracting the attention of record companies. Warner Classics has got in early with its 33-disc set that aims to include everything Debussy wrote, from his earliest songs of 1879-80 to the three sonatas composed during the first world war, as well as his own transcriptions, and arrangements of his music made by others during his lifetime.
Presented chronologically within each genre, it’s a scrupulously assembled and documented collection, with the bulk of the material sourced from within the Warner group – performances that first appeared on EMI, Erato or Virgin Classics – but also borrowing from other labels for some of the rarities, as well as including a handful of minor pieces recorded for the first time. There’s also a final disc of Debussy’s own performances from piano rolls and 78s, playing some of his Préludes and the Children’s Corner suite, and accompanying Mary Garden in the Verlaine settings of Ariettes Oubliées and an aria from Pelléas et Mélisande.
As a reference source it is invaluable, especially for tracking down some of the early songs or more obscure fragments of orchestral music, but the main problem with any collection of this all-encompassing kind is unevenness. The recordings of the composer himself apart, the performances range across more than 60 years – with a lot of the songs in particular dating from the 1970s – and their quality, along with that of the recordings, can be variable and sometimes rather disappointing. There are certainly more convincing performances of many of the piano works to be found elsewhere, while Carlo Maria Giulini’s rather staid renditions of La Mer and the Nocturnes with the Philharmonia Orchestra, for instance, don’t stand up against the best current versions.
The performance of Pelléas, conducted by Armin Jordan with the Monte Carlo orchestra, is decent, but one wonders why the set didn’t opt for Herbert von Karajan’s lustrous 1978 EMI recording instead. Against that this set does include Debussy’s Prix de Rome cantatas, his early unfinished opera Rodrigue et Chiméne, in its only recording to date conducted by Kent Nagano, as well as a pretty full version of Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien, with every morsel of Debussy’s score, and a bit too much of D’Annunzio’s text, and fragments with piano from the unfinished opera The Fall of the House of Usher. There are very few musicological loose ends here, and to have all these rarities as well as the masterpieces available in a single package (though without any texts and translations), makes it a very satisfying survey.
