Debussy: 24 Preludes (orch. Breiner) – Märkl

Somewhere Debussy is smiling, or possibly wincing, and probably both at once.

The Preludes were never meant for orchestra. They emerged, book by book, out of that strange late period when Debussy was writing music that seemed to erase its own footprints: harmonies that arrive from nowhere and vanish before they resolve, textures so particular to the piano’s hammers and dampers that transcription would seem, on its face, an act of vandalism. And yet the composer himself pointed the way. He orchestrated “Clair de lune” material elsewhere in his output, encouraged Caplet, sanctioned Büsser. Debussy’s piano writing already thinks orchestrally: those widely spaced sonorities, the pedal washes that function like string tremolos, the bell-tones that ask, almost audibly, for horns. So Peter Breiner’s project here has ancestry.

What strikes me first, hearing this Naxos release, is the restraint. Breiner could have gone the Ravel route — think of “Ondine” reimagined with the harp glissandi and celesta twinkle of a Ravel ballet score — and dazzled us with color for color’s sake. He mostly doesn’t. He listens instead to what the piano writing implies and finds the orchestral instrument that was, in some sense, always hiding inside the harmony. “La cathédrale engloutie” opens with basses and low strings groaning up out of some underwater crypt. By the time the brass enter with those parallel triads, Debussy’s homage to organum, to Notre Dame de Paris eight centuries removed, the effect is genuinely eerie. More so than at the keyboard, if I’m honest, where the sonority can blur into pedal-mush on a lesser instrument.

Elsewhere the results are more mixed. That clarinet solo opening “La fille aux cheveux de lin” is pleasant, warm, woody. It left me wanting the airier, more vulnerable timbre of a flute, which is what I suspect most listeners carry in their inner ear from the piano original’s simplicity. A small thing. But orchestration lives and dies on small things: the difference between an oboe and an English horn, a choice made and then inhabited for four bars that color everything around it.

Jun Märkl, who already recorded the Colin Matthews orchestrations with the Hallé for this same label, clearly knows this repertoire from the inside — the La Mer, the Images, the Nocturnes, all present in his discography — and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra plays with the kind of transparency Debussy requires and rarely gets. Massed string sound can smother this music; here the violins keep a certain vibrato-light poise, the winds stay soloistic even in tutti passages. “Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest” comes off as genuinely frightening, a squall worthy of the “Dialogue du vent et de la mer” from La Mer itself. Breiner’s brass snarls are perfectly judged, not overdone. “Feux d’artifice” closes the whole cycle in a blaze that had me thinking, not for the first time, how much this music anticipates Varèse.

Does the orchestra improve on the original? No. I say this having sat with Gieseking’s Debussy, with Michelangeli’s glacial, otherworldly Book II, with Zimerman’s more recent traversal, for the better part of my listening life. The piano version keeps something the orchestra necessarily loses: ambiguity. Debussy’s pedal blur is a feature, not a bug, and once you assign specific instruments to specific harmonic strands you inevitably clarify what the composer left deliberately unclear. “Des pas sur la neige” wants to sound like it’s coming from very far away and nowhere in particular. Give it to strings and winds and it acquires address, position, a place in space it never had before.

But that’s a philosophical objection, not a practical one, and it shouldn’t discourage anyone from hearing this disc. Breiner has done careful, loving, idiomatic work, closer in spirit to Büsser than to the more freely reimagined Matthews versions, from what I can gather without having the Hallé disc in front of me for direct comparison. He resists the temptation to modernize, to make Debussy sound like Boulez’s teacher rather than Fauré’s rebellious student. The disc rewards patience. Not every prelude blooms equally in orchestral dress — “La danse de Puck” wants a lighter, more Ravelian touch than it quite gets — but the hits outnumber the misses, and the RSNO’s playing throughout has that silvery, unforced quality this repertoire lives or dies by.

Worth owning? Yes, with the usual caveat that applies to all transcriptions: as a supplement, an illumination, a new lamp shone on old rooms, never as a replacement for the original. Debussy at the piano remains Debussy entire. This is Debussy refracted, and refraction, done this well, has its own considerable pleasures.