Debussy: Pelleas et Melisande Suite & Schoenberg: Pelleas und Melisande, Op. 5

Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Jonathan Nott

Debussy: Pelleas et Melisande Suite & Schoenberg: Pelleas und Melisande, Op. 5
Format
Audio
Published
12 November 2021
ISBN
0827949078262

Debussy: Pelleas et Melisande Suite & Schoenberg: Pelleas und Melisande, Op. 5

Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Jonathan Nott

This new OSR recording presents the two most ambitious musical responses to Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1893 epoch-making play Pelléas et Mélisande.

Conductor Jonathan Nott has created a new suite of Debussy’s opera, which is much more extensive, and focuses more on the actual drama and symphonic development than existing suites that rely heavily on Debussy’s interludes. Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande is often perceived as relatively “amorphous”, its narrative structure obscure, leaving concealed all but the most explicit references to the drama on which Schoenberg based it.

In this recording, Jonathan Nott introduces a novel track division and analytical track titles that make the music’s relation to the story much more tangible to the listener. Programming it next to the music of Debussy’s opera allows us to compare both works, and to see how the most important innovators of turn-of-the-century music responded to this haunting, Symbolist story.

Review

The love story of Pelléas and Mélisande is the classic story of wife, husband and lover. While it’s full of drama and everyone important dies in the end, Maeterlinck’s play has had a lasting impact upon the musical world. Claude Debussy’s opera was plagued with issues, from Maeterlinck’s quarrels through to venue shortcomings. However, this five-act opera is still loved today, and this new suite arranged by conductor Jonathan Nott is full of the lyrical themes and beauty of the original opera itself. The original play was constantly preoccupied with motifs of water and death. Here, the slippery nature of the harmony and melodic lines, combined with a constant undertow of darkness, brings these two ideas to the fore.

While Debussy was meticulously composing his opera, Schoenberg was working on his own symphonic poem based on the same story. Richard Strauss suggested it to Schoenberg as a good source for inspiration, and Schoenberg seems to have grabbed it with both hands. It is a delight to have both works side by side on this album to compare not just musical ideas, but those fleeting and ephemeral ideas of life, love, death and the eternal search for happiness. The Orchestre de la Suisse Romande are truly luscious in their interpretation and elegantly balance the light and dark of both composers’ styles.


Kate Rockstrom is a friend of Readings.

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