David Grimal & Les Dissonances @ George Enescu Festival 22.09.2023 (FULL CONCERT), Romanian Athenaeum
2:58 Claude Debussy: La mer, trois esquisses symphoniques pour orchestre, L. 109
32:44 Ernest Chausson: Poème, Op. 25
51:43 (David Grimal 1st encore) Ysaÿe: 6 Sonatas for Violin Solo, Op. 27 / Sonata No. 5 in G Major - I. L'Aurore
57:56 (David Grimal 2nd encore) J.S. Bach: Sonata for Violin Solo No. 2 in A Minor, BWV 1003 - 1. Grave
1:06:58 Arnold Schoenberg: Pelleas und Melisande, Op. 5
SEPARATELY:
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Recorded from public broadcast. Enjoy!
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Debussy all his life maintained a nearly total silence about his childhood. (At the time of the birth of Achille-Claude, Manuel-Achille Debussy and his wife ran a small ceramics store, the father soon changing to a job with the Fives-Lille‑Railway Company, which entailed moving the family to Clichy, a suburb of Paris). He did, however, make occasional and affectionate references to summer weeks spent at the beaches of Cannes. He learned then to love the sea, and no one who knows Debussy’s music need be told that what he loved particularly was its unpredictability, its ever‑changing nature. His parents at some point conceived the notion that he ought to be a sailor, but his vocation was determined when a Mme. Mauté de Fleurville, a lady with fascinating connections (she had been a pupil of Chopin and was the mother-in‑law of Paul Verlaine), discovered his musical gift.
Thirty years elapsed between those inspiring lessons and the first sketches for La Mer. It is, however, always a surprise to recall that La Mer was only the composer’s seventh major orchestral score, so brilliantly assured is it, so possessive in ways that sometimes make it seem that Debussy invented the modern orchestra.-Michael Steinberg
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Chausson’s Poème for violin and orchestra in three linked movements was composed in 1896. It was commissioned by the Belgian violin virtuoso Eugène Ysaÿe, to whom the work is dedicated and who gave its first public performances, in Nancy on 27 December 1896, then at the Concerts Colonne in Paris on 4 April 1897. Ysaÿe enthusiastically promoted the piece, systematically including it in the programmes of the recitals he gave all over the world, and later composed in his turn a Poème elegiaque inspired by Chausson’s work, published in 1893 and dedicated to Gabriel Fauré. Chausson initially conceived the Poème for violin and orchestra, but also transcribed it for violin and piano. Originally entitled Le Chant de l’amour triomphant, it was inspired by the short story ‘The Song of Love Triumphant’ by the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev, who lived in Paris from 1870 until his death in 1883, and through his residence with the Viardot family became friendly with numerous composers. Turgenev’s text, published in 1881, depicts a love triangle and a woman spellbound by a melody played on the violin. Some commentators have seen in the reference to this short story a possible evocation of Fauré’s ill-fated love for Pauline Viardot’s daughter Marianne. A key work in the violin repertory, the Poème combines a mysterious inspiration drawn from Turgenev’s work with brilliant violin writing that makes it a piece at once poetic and eloquent, in which the deployment of the performer’s technical capacities never seems to be a vain demonstration of virtuosity. (bruzanemediabase.com)
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Schoenberg's Pelleas und Melisande (1902-1903) is one of several compositions that has come to be regarded as the last gasp of Romanticism -- or one of its grandest survivors -- while simultaneously suggesting a future path for music. In this respect, it has much in common with the old-new music of Gustav Mahler, whose Fifth and Sixth symphonies were taking shape at roughly the same time. Of the two composers, it was Schoenberg ("Schönberg" until moving to the United States in 1934) who at the turn of the century clung more tenaciously to the past, a past dominated above all by Richard Wagner's by then nearly half-a-century old Tristan und Isolde, whose themes, dramatic and musical, haunted Schoenberg.
The immediate inspiration for Pelleas und Melisandewas Maurice Maeterlinck's 1892 drama, which gave rise to numerous other musical treatments, most notably the incidental scores by Fauré and Sibelius and Debussy's opera -- the latter to serve as a guiding light for a generation and more of European composers. (Herbert Glass)