In 1920, two years after Claude Debussy’s death, La Revue Musicale published a memorial supplement. It had a cover by Raoul Dufy, and contained tributes from 10 leading European composers. Bartók submitted one of his Improvisations on Hungarian Folk Songs, Ravel offered the first movement of what would become his Sonata for Violin and Cello, and Stravinsky provided the chorale that would close his Symphonies of Wind Instruments, also dedicated to Debussy’s memory.
Birmingham Contemporary Music Group’s contribution to the second weekend of the city’s Debussy festival interleaved five of those miniatures with four tributes commissioned to mark the centenary of his death. Jun-Eun Park’s touching Tombeau de Claude Debussy alternated an obsessively falling, lamenting figure in the piano with angry outbursts from violin and cello, while Tagore’s Fireflies by Sinta Wullur underpinned the vocal lines with gamelan-like patterns in the first two settings and the shapes of an Indian raga in the third. Frédéric Pattar used a Maeterlinck text for (…De Qui Parlez-Vous?), with the voice alternating between speech and song amid cello punctuations, while Julian Anderson’s Tombeau referenced more Debussy associations with a text by Mallarmé, and vocal inflections and strummed string effects with an inescapable Spanish feel.
Among the pieces from the original Tombeau, Richard Uttley’s rapt performance of Paul Dukas’s La Plainte, au (Loin du Faune (a piano elegy haunted by the Prélude à l’Après-Midi) and soprano Ruby Hughes’s account of Erik Satie’s jewel-like souvenir of his friendship with Debussy stood out.
Most striking of all was Alexandra Wood and Ulrich Heinen’s performance of the Ravel sonata movement, not only signalling a new direction for Ravel but in this context suggesting a way Debussy’s music might have gone had he lived longer.
