November 15, 2010

  • Review: Two Auric Ballets for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes

     

    Diaghilev – Ballets Russes, Volume 7
    Auric: Les Facheux/La Pastorale
    Deutsche Radio Philharmonic Saarbrucken Kaiserslautern/Christoph Poppen
    Hanssler Classic 93.265
    Recording:   ****/****
    Performance: ****/****

    Sergei Diaghilev’s fame, or infamy depending on your musical taste, historically rests on the music of Igor Stravinsky whose music caught the attention of the world with the works he composed for the famed choreographer.  Ballet enthusiasts might argue that such cause célèbre for works like The Rite of Spring had as much to do with the angular dancing on stage and primitive subject matter as it did Stravinsky’s visceral music.  Fortunately, Hanssler Classics has embarked on a survey of works commissioned for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes that should help us all broaden our appreciation for what impact his choices of music as well as dance would have in the world.

    Perhaps to best appreciate how unique the new music was that Diaghilev was bringing to the stage one needs to listen to a little Delibes or Tchaikovsky.  These rich, nearly sugary, romantic works were, at least in the latter case, still relatively new music at the time.  But the post-Romantic Wagnerian sounds were a far cry from the almost clear classical sounding structured of many of the composer’s Diaghilev commissioned.  Enter Georges Auric, a member of Les Six, and a composer who could write themes as well as complex textures with a mastery that easily shifted from dense to open harmonies.  Auric would write three ballets in the 1920s for the Ballet Russes and the middle one, Les Matelots (1925) was the most successful.  For this release, we get a chance to hear the other two in their entirety.  All feature libretti by Boris Kochno, who was Diaghilev’s private secretary in the 1920s.

    Les Facheux (1924) is taken from a successful play of the same title by Moliere and was intended to kick off a “French season” for the Ballets Russes.  Georges Braque created the scenery and costumes as well as a curtain that required a scantily clad nymph to pose behind it-which no one wanted to do-and was eventually painted onto to the screen.  Unfortunately, this was one of those times when all the different pieces of the ballet production and its various artists apparently worked without knowledge about what was going on with the others resulting in a series of missteps—no pun intended.  Auric’s sense for the music was inspred from some of Braque’s work for the ballet and his own previous incidental music for a stage production of the play.  The music has a mixture of wit and 18th century clarity for which Auric was capable.  Brilliant orchestration, that includes interesting rhythmic ideas at times, helps carry the rather light music being created here and there is a rather circus-like atmosphere in places where “wrong” notes and melodic directions that head in unexpected ways are coupled with a sort of bitonality that seems relatively tame by today’s standards but was revolutionary in its day.  Most fascinating in this particular ballet score is the way dissonance tends to appear.  Often the music accelerates into large punctuated dissonances that then spin off into more open-sounding music.  Small motivic ideas often begin a passage until the melody idea is introduced.  Auric also tends to run at most three threads of ideas against each other at any given time that can be picked out quite easily in the texture.  The final two-three minutes feature several Romantic gestures that are quite parodistic in the sound they create and the expectations that they break.  Les Facheux is engaging musically with plenty of nice surprises and an engaging performance that will make it worth the time to get to know.

    The other ballet represented here is from 1926.  La Pastorale is receiving its premiere recording here.  The work is cast in 13 sections of various length.  One of its claims to musicological history is that this was one of George Balanchine’s first independently choreographed works, having been recently hired by the Ballets Russes,  The plot of the ballet is fairly modern at every turn from its bicycle-riding telegram delivery boy to the appearance of film makers shooting in the countryside.  The first half of the ballet is filled with wonderful evocations of the countryside with pastoral oboe and fluttering flute bird calls.  The sense of rural life is even hinted at a few times by a droning bass line.  But the melodies again move in unusual ways with little punctuated chords moving the action along.  It is a work that moves well from smaller intimate scoring to large orchestral colors.  Auric likes to double his brass with different string combinations and in this score one can appreciate this a great deal because it is quite clear.  Also fun are little hunting-like fanfares, scales that never resolve after a great energy, large orchestral unisons that dissolve into the light circus-like atmospheres. 

    I have not heard the previous releases in this series.  They covered most of the familiar works written for the Ballets Russes.  This new release is quite welcome in providing a great deal of well-performed Auric in such stellar sound.  The woodwind playing here is quite well done and Christoph Poppen’s tempi seem to work well in getting at the quick shifts in texture.  Though Auric would become most famous for his theme to Moulin Rouge, and his film work for Cocteau, these two works, so well performed, provide a rare listen to his larger-scale works.