Alongside Stravinsky, Claude Debussy probably had more influence on the course of 20th-century music than any other composer. The centenary of his death is on 25 March, and although a number of orchestras across the UK are acknowledging the occasion, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO) is marking it in the comprehensive way his genius deserves.
Over two weekends, the CBSO and Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (BCMG), with students from the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, are performing almost all of Debussy’s orchestral and chamber music. They are including a generous selection of his songs and piano pieces, and exploring some of the ways in which his influence percolated through subsequent generations. The big omission is Debussy’s only completed opera, Pelléas et Mélisande, but that will follow in June, with a performance conducted by Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla.
This has clearly been a project close to Gražinytė-Tyla’s heart, and she opened the orchestral concerts with the work that first announced Debussy’s originality, Prélude à l’Après-Midi d’un Faune. It was also the piece with which she opened the CBSO programme in January 2016 that confirmed she should be the orchestra’s new music director. It was thrilling to hear again the buoyancy and vividness she brings to this music; despite the fluidity of her gestures, it presents Debussy much more as a symbolist than an impressionist.
The rarely heard a cappella work Trois Chansons de Charles d’Orléans followed, sung with great panache by the Birmingham University Singers, before the CBSO Youth Chorus supplied the female voices for another rarity, the early cantata La Damoiselle Élue, in which, as Gražinytė-Tyla demonstrated, Debussy’s magical ear for texture and colour was already fully formed. The youth choir also contributed wordlessly to the Nocturnes, primary colours as much as suggestive pastels once again. Before that, the velvety mezzo Aga Mikolaj had sung three of Szymanowski’s Love Songs of Hafiz, in which Debussy’s textural imagination is fused with elements of Schoenbergian expressionism.
In a short concert the following day, Gražinytė-Tyla included the chamber-ensemble arrangement of the Prélude – a second chance to savour principal flute Marie-Christine Zupancic’s supple solo playing – and another orchestral principal, Oliver Janes, was the soloist in the Première Rhapsodie for clarinet and orchestra. But the main works were a spiky performance of Symphonies of Wind Instruments (Stravinsky’s memorial to Debussy) and the bewitching Jeux (Debussy’s final orchestral masterpiece), conducted by Michael Seal, which remained a little earthbound until its final moments.
BCMG’s responsibility in the festival is the exploration of Debussy’s legacy. Its contribution to the first weekend was a programme conducted by Julien Leroy featuring music by Pierre Boulez and Tristan Murail. Boulez repaid his debt in his superlative performances as a conductor, setting new standards for the interpretation of Debussy’s music, but the colours and textures of his own music also reveal that heritage, even in the fits and flurries of a relatively minor piece such as Dérive I. Murail was represented by three scores from different decades, all of which showed that, as well as an acute ear for instrumental colour, he and Debussy share a fondness for titles inspired by the natural world, though only the earliest of the pieces, Couleur de Mer, seemed to go much urther than harmless evocation.
• The Debussy festival continues from 23 to 25 March. Gražinytė-Tyla conducts a concert performance of Pelléas et Mélisande in Symphony Hall, Birmingham, on 23 June. Box office: 0121-780 3333.
