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Reviewer: Jerry
Dubins Let me begin with a comparison that is sure to raise some eyebrows, but hopefully, one that will also establish certain links between French composers separated by 150 years of music history. Here it is: François Couperin (1668–1733) and Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764) were the Debussy and Ravel of their time.
Couperin composed voluminously
for the harpsichord, as did Debussy for the piano. For Couperin
ornamentation was a fetish; mordents and trills turned him on. Debussy spent
a lifetime mixing musical paints into new colors, hues, and textures,
spreading them over the keyboard as an artist applies his pallet knife and
brush to canvas. Couperin’s keyboard music is largely representational,
consisting of character pieces that are meant to portray both people he
knew, as well as various objects and specific places. Most of Debussy’s
piano pieces, too, are descriptive in nature. Couperin came to be seen as
the culmination, paradigm, and paragon of the French Baroque keyboard
school. Whether Debussy sought similar recognition for his work or not, he
came, nonetheless, to represent the face of French Impressionism in the
musical sphere. In their seeking color, texture, surface effect, and music
of descriptive or programmatic content, Couperin and Debussy were both
Romantics, in the broader sense of the term.
Rameau and Ravel each composed
a not insignificant volume of keyboard music as well, but not as much as
Couperin and Debussy did, nor were their keyboard works as central to their
output as a whole. And while it would be inaccurate to say that neither
Rameau nor Ravel showed any interest in writing representational character
pieces or in exploring the coloristic and textural potential of their
respective instruments, a quick glance at their keyboard works reveals—with
notable exceptions, of course—a more Classical orientation towards form. Look at the printed editions of Rameau’s harpsichord suites, and what you’ll see is music laid out in a very straightforward-looking, structured manner, its counterpoint clear and largely free of the fastidious ornaments that pepper Couperin’s pieces, and many movements bearing formal as opposed to descriptive titles—i.e., Sarabande, Courante, Gigue, and so on.
Ravel is like that too. He
paints in bright colors and bold strokes, as opposed to pastels and subtle
gestures. One might almost call the one pair, Rameau and Ravel, masculine,
and the other pair, Couperin and Debussy, feminine, though I won’t pursue
that analogy any further.
There is yet one more
comparison to be made, and it’s perhaps the most determinative of all.
Rameau and Ravel were men of the theater; Couperin and Debussy were not.
Opera, ballet, and other staged entertainments, and along with them,
orchestral music, were more central to the lives of Rameau and Ravel than
were their keyboard works; whereas the opposite—again with notable
exceptions—was true of Couperin and Debussy. The latter, of course, made an
extremely important contribution to opera in the form of Pelléas et
Mélisande, but his efforts in the field of ballet, namely Jeux
and Khamma, turned out to be pretty dismal affairs. Couperin, as far
as I know, produced no operas or ballets. And here’s the part that’s bound to motivate a letter or two to the editor. I believe that these conflicting impulses run through the entire history of French music. American composer Ned Rorem mischievously once wrote that “everything French is profoundly superficial, and everything German is superficially profound.” I would apply both sides of that proposition to the French side of the equation. Couperin and Debussy are profoundly superficial; Rameau and Ravel are superficially profound. Over the years, integral sets of Rameau’s harpsichord pieces have not been hard to come by. Most have occupied no more than two discs—dramatic evidence, if it were needed, of how relatively small Rameau’s keyboard output is compared to Couperin’s, which occupies 10 discs in Kenneth Gilbert’s Harmonia Mundi survey. One or two of the Rameau “complete”s has spilled over onto a third disc, for reasons I will explain below; and in one case, that of Scott Ross’s set, onto four discs, but only because the discs in question are LPs. I do not believe Ross’s Telefunken Rameau traversal was ever transferred to CD. In one of the very early issues of Fanfare to be published, 2:4, George Hill reviewed the Ross LPs, which were reviewed again by Edward Strickland in 7:5. Other versions that have made it both to CD and to Fanfare for review have been Michel Kiener on two Harmonia Mundi discs (Barry Brenesal, 27:6), a rare copy of which is selling at Amazon, as of this writing in early July 2018, for $90. A much more recent two-disc set by Mahan Esfahani on Hyperion again went to Brenesal for review in 38:4, and in the same issue, another recent account by Ketil Haugsan on Simax also went to Brenesal. Back on LP, Trevor Pinnock’s Rameau survey from the 1970s was spread over a number of volumes on Vanguard. They were released one at a time over a lengthy period, and then reissued on CD under the CRD label, also individually. To be honest, I don’t know if CRD ever completed the transfers, or if it did, whether the discs are still available. In 2005, Pinnock recorded a new single disc selection of Rameau’s pieces for Avie under the album title Les Cyclopes, but even that CD may be nla. Accounts by Sophie Yates (Chandos), Gilbert Rowland (Naxos), William Christie Harmonia Mundi), Alan Cuckston (Amadis), Kenneth Gilbert (Archiv), Christoph Rousset (L’Oiseau Lyre), and Blandine Verlet (Astrée) have also made appearances in Fanfare and have come and gone in the catalogs. The last mentioned, Verlet, is another, like the Ross, which I don’t believe has ever been transferred to CD.
The new release before me by
Steven Devine is one of the few that occupies three very full CDs, the
reason being that he includes a number of items that fall outside of the
Pièces de clavecin that make up the three designated sets of suites.
The Premier Livre de Pièces de Clavecin in A Minor, or First Suite, is
made up of nine numbers and is dated 1706. Two more suites, in E Minor and D
Minor/Major, respectively, are twinned simply under the title Pièces de
Clavecin, and carry a date of 1724. The E-Minor Suite contains nine
numbers and the D-Minor/Major Suite, 11. Many of these, like Couperin’s
pieces, do sport descriptive titles. For example, the eighth piece in the
D-Minor/Major Suite, Les cyclopes, is the one Pinnock pinched for the title
of his above-mentioned single disc. Finally, another two suites, in A
Minor/Major, and G Major/Minor, respectively, dating from 1728, were
published together under the joint title, Nouvelles Suites de Pièces de
Clavecin. The first of these two “new” suites is made up of seven numbers,
and the second of eight.
To preclude any possible
confusion, I should mention that not all recordings make clear, as Devine’s
does, that the 1724 and 1728 publications are actually made up of two
separate suites each. From the track listing of the Rousset set, which I
have, you would think that the 1724 Pièces de Clavecin is all one
long suite of 20 numbers, when in fact it’s two suites of nine and 11
numbers respectively, each anchored in a different key area. The same goes
for the 1728 Nouvelles Suites de Pièces de Clavecin, which Rousset’s
set gives as a single suite of 15 numbers, when it is actually made up of
two suites of seven and eight numbers respectively, each centered on its own
key area. One more item, a stand-alone piece which isn’t a movement in any of the suites, is usually included under the heading of Rameau’s “Complete Harpsichord Works,” and that is La Dauphine. It’s dated 1747 and is believed to have been improvised by Rameau on the spot at the proxy wedding of the Dauphin Louis Ferdinand to his second wife, the 15-year-old Maria Josepha of Saxony, who wasn’t present to say “I do.” A later ceremony for “show” was held at Versailles the following month.
La Dauphine
is Rameau’s last known harpsichord piece, though he lived another 17 years.
As noted earlier, Rameau was mainly a man of the theater; his harpsichord
works are almost incidental to his output. From 1747 onward, he produced
some 20 operas, and at least a dozen or more before that. One of them, an
opera-ballet from 1735–36, titled Les Indes galantes, is about to
become an important part of Devine’s Rameau collection, and explains why
it’s on three discs instead of two.
Rameau was not alone in
repurposing music he’d already composed. Thus, the airs and ballet numbers
from several of his operas provided a readymade source of material from
which he extracted orchestral suites. These reconstituted pieces, stripped
of their singing, dancing, and stagecraft, were felt to be ideally suited
for the concerts spirituels during Holy Week, when opera and other secular
entertainments were suspended. It didn’t seem to dawn on anyone, or bother
them if it did, that the music purportedly intended to spiritualize them was
recycled from those very proscribed secular works. At any rate, Rameau found
his Les Indes galantes particularly ripe for picking, drawing from it
a nearly hour-long suite of 27 numbers, which occupies the lion’s portion of
Devine’s third disc. Rameau made the harpsichord transcription of the
orchestral suite himself, and according to Devine, three of its numbers—“Tambourin,”
“Menuet pour les Guerriers et Amazones,” and the concluding
Chaconne—are unplayable by a single harpsichordist. He is thus joined for
these three pieces by Robin Bigwood. Not content to leave it at that, Devine
fills out his third disc with the Cinq Pièces of 1741 and the Air pour
Zéphire, the latter in Devine’s own transcription.
Everything about this release
should add up to a resounding recommendation. Steven Devine is the
co-principal keyboard player with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment
and also the principal keyboard player for The Gonzaga Band, Apollo and Pan,
and The Classical Opera Company. He is well versed in the music and musical
practices of 17th and early 18th centuries and performs regularly with these
and other groups around Europe. He has provided his own highly informative
and readable booklet essay, which touches on the various technical aspects
of Rameau’s keyboard writing. For this recording Devine has chosen a
beautifully resonant and solid sounding instrument—a copy by Ian Tucker of a
1636 double manual harpsichord by Antwerp maker Andreas Ruckers—tuned to
A=415, Temperament Ordinaire. The recording captures the instrument in an
ideal-sounding open but not reverberant space.
As I said, everything about
Devine’s Rameau should point to a strong recommendation. Yet, as I
listened to Devine play these pieces, I was bothered by what struck me as
slower than usual tempos, which in not a few cases left the music sounding
limp and lifeless. Take,
for example, “La poule” (The Hen) from the Nouvelles Suites de
Pièces de Clavecin.
This has to be one of the
funniest pieces of music ever written. Not a single first-time listener has
to be told what the piece depicts. The visual image of a hen scratching at
the ground, its head jerkily bobbing up and down, and its waddle waddling is
so pictorially precise you find yourself with a sudden craving for Kentucky
Fried Chicken. But listening to Devine play the piece, I couldn’t believe how slow and deliberately he takes it, drawing it out to a seemingly interminable 7:16 compared to Rousset’s 5:31. Devine’s hen is roadkill, run over in its tracks by a semi the instant it left its coop. It’s not just Devine’s tempo, however, that robs the piece of its humor. His playing of it lacks that twitching, spastic character that others, including Rousset, bring to it. This was the first time, ever, that I’ve heard this piece and not laughed out loud. To the contrary, I found it dull and boring and kept wondering how much longer it was going to go on. I’ve singled out this one piece, but it’s an approach Devine seems to take to the entire collection. His tempos are sluggish throughout, and it’s as if he doesn’t appreciate Rameau’s tart, tongue-in-cheek humor. To return to my opening comparison between Rameau and Ravel, the two of them, I think, were master caricaturists, and some of their parodies could be quite biting. I’m sure Rameau was well practiced at this in having to deal with both the character roles in his operas and the egos of the singers that portrayed them on stage.
It was then that I came across
a review of Devine’s set by critic Andrew Benson Wilson, who wrote, “As for
the playing, there are several factors that separate Steven Devine’s playing
from the many competitors. These include the outstanding sensitivity of his
playing, ranging from his choice of sensible speeds, mercifully slower than
the speed merchants, to the delicacy of his touch and the refinement of his
articulation.” “Sensible speeds, mercifully slower”—to Wilson those are pluses. To me, in Rameau, they’re minuses. I agree that Devine plays with outstanding sensitivity, delicacy of touch, and refinement of articulation. And he is aided in this by a truly beautiful sounding harpsichord. But nowhere does Wilson say that Devine is responsive to Rameau’s unique Muse. Devine manages to accomplish something I’ve not heard any other player do in Rameau, and that is to make his music sound unspontaneous and uninteresting. If my reaction to Devine’s Rameau is unduly harsh, it’s because my reaction to his Bach album on Chandos was completely the opposite. I gave it a rave review in 38:2, so I know what a fine artist Devine is and what he is capable of when the music strikes his fancy. It may just be that Rameau is a composer with whom Devine’s musical instincts are not entirely in sync. Rameau is not Bach, and playing the former like the latter doesn’t work. | |
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