Claude Debussy: 3 Great Orchestral Works: Orchestra: Score

SKU: FA.MFCD017B

8.27 x 11.69 inches.

Contains Le Roi Lear: Prelude,Premiere Fanfare, and La Mort de Cordelia,Toomai des elephants, Rodrigue et Chimene: Prelude a l'acte 1p. Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien: La Passion , and No-ja-li ou Le Palais du Silence

From Robert Orledge's notes:

My interest in the wonderful music of Claude Debussy began in the 1980s when I researched and published a book with Cambridge University Press entitled Debussy and the Theatre. During the course of my studies in Paris, I was amazed to discover that Debussy planned over 50 theatrical works but only finished two of these entirely by himself (the opera Pelleas et Melisande in 1893-1902 and the ballet Jeux for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in 1912-13). Of the rest, many were never started musically (like Siddartha and Orphee-roi with the Oriental scholar Victor Segalen, 1907); some had a few tantalising sketches (like the Edgar Allan Poe opera Le Diable dans le beffroi, 1902-03); some were half-finished (like his other Poe opera La Chute de la Maison Usher, 1908-17); while others were musically complete but had their orchestrations completed by other composers (like Khamma, by Charles Koechlin, 1912-13; or Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien and La Boite a joujoux by his 'angel of corrections' ['l'ange des Corrections'] Andre Caplet in 1911 and 1919 respectively).

For it has to be admitted that what some scholars call Debussy's 'compulsive achievement' could equally well be viewed as laziness, especially as far as the minute detail required for calligraphing his orchestral scores was concerned. It was as if creating the music itself was of greater importance than controlling its final sound, even if Debussy was an imaginative orchestrator when he found the time and energy to do it. It also seems true that Debussy also preferred inventing ideas to turning them into complete pieces. However, despite the lack of detail in many of his sketches (missing clefs, key signatures, dynamics, phrasing, etc.) the notes themselves are surprisingly accurate, whether or not they can be compared with a later draft. Thus, a large number of sketches exist for his Chinese ballet No-ja-li ou Le Palais du Silence and it is not too difficult to see which parts of Georges de Feure's 1913 scenario (see below) inspired which ideas. But Debussy hardly made any attempt to join them together after the first few bars.

It was usually up to his publisher, Jacques Durand, to find solutions when Debussy risked a breach of contract. Debussy was supposed to supervise the orchestrations completed by others, but this supervision was usually very light and restricted to quiet, sensitive moments in which problems were easier to spot. Far from jealously guarding every one of his created notes, as Ravel did, Debussy once even went as far as to ask Koechlin to 'write a ballet for him that he would sign' on 26 March 1914 when he was hard-pressed to fulfil his lucrative contract for No-ja-li with Andre Charlot at the Alhambra Theatre in London. In the end, Debussy (through Durand) sent Charlot the symphonic suite Printemps instead, whose orchestration had been completed by Henri Busser in the Spring of 1912.

So, when I was offered early retirement as Professor of Music at Liverpool University in 2004, I seized the opportunity it would give me to spend time trying to reconstruct some of Debussy's lost potential masterpieces from his existing sketches and drafts--then orchestrating them in Debussy's style when this was appropriate. I had begun this mission in 2001 with the most promising project, the missing parts of Scene 2 of La Chute de la Maison Usher and the sheer joy it gave me at every stage persuaded me to tackle other projects, especially when Debussy experts were unable to identify exactly where I took over from Debussy (and vice versa) in Usher.

SKU: BT.EMBZ15061

Zoltán Kocsis (1952 - 2016) was not just a phenomenal pianist. He was also regarded as a musical 'polymath' whose genius embraced the activities of a composer, conductor, editor, instrumentalist, and arranger. In the last capacity, he added some 150 works to symphonic, chamber, song and piano repertoire. He gladly adapted music of the turn of the 20th century, as appears from his transcriptions of Richard Strauss, Ravel, Rachmaninoff, Enescu, and above all, Debussy. (Many of these are distributed by Editio Musica Budapest.) 'In Debussy's case, (...) I was always interested in works that offered possibilities beyond the bounds of the piano, possibilities for orchestration.Just as with Liszt it was often possible to see that certain of his works had been written for piano for publication purposes, so with Debussy it is clear that mainly his song accompaniments exceeded the bounds of possibility for the piano,' Kocsis stated in one interview. Perhaps that recognition also encouraged him to arrange the popular piano work Valse romantique (1890) for clarinet and piano. The arrangement superbly pinpoints the sensitive, almost ingratiating tunefulness of the Waltz, adding a piece that sounds great and is rewarding to perform to the clarinet repertoire.

Mit dem unlängst verstorbenen Zoltán Kocsis betrauert die Nachwelt nicht nur einen phänomenalen Pianisten, sondern auch einen 'Polyhistor der Musik': Sein außergewöhnliches Talent entfaltete sich ebenfalls in seiner Tätigkeit als Komponist, als Dirigent, als Herausgeber und nicht zuletzt auch als Arrangeur und Bearbeiter organisch. Durch letztere Aktivität bereicherte er die symphonische, Kammer-, Lied- und Klavierliteratur um etwa einhundertfünfzig Werke. Sehr gern adaptierte er die Musik aus der Zeit der Wende zum 20. Jahrhundert, wie auch seine Richard-Strauss-, Ravel-, Rachmaninov-, Enescu- und vor allem Debussy-Transkriptionen belegen. (Mehrere davon werden auch von unseremVerlag vertrieben.).