Review: Debussy (orch. Breiner) - 24 Préludes (RSNO / Märkl)

I recently led an orchestration seminar at Durham University, and the piece I began with was Claude Debussy’s Prélude to the Afternoon of a Faun. If you don’t know the piece or haven’t listened to it in some time, please do yourself a favour and seek it out. It’s incredibly beautiful music, more sturdily constructed than it may seem to be on first listen, and it’s full of orchestral colour. Debussy was one of the great orchestrators, able to pull a stunning array of timbres out of a group of instruments, and always in the service of a greater compositional vision. He was a true original.

But Debussy didn’t just write for orchestra. He also wrote some wonderful chamber works, including a string quartet and a stunning piece for solo flute, and an impressive body of solo piano music. His Préludes for piano are a masterwork, full of imagination and creative genius, and there are numerous recordings available. (My favourite is by the late Paul Jacobs.) Again, do yourself a favour and seek them out.

Here’s my point: Debussy could have written his Préludes for orchestra, but he chose not to. He certainly had the technique and imagination to turn them into a set of orchestral pieces, full of the instrumental colour that he was a master at, but he decided to write them for piano. For whatever reason, he felt the piano, not the orchestra, was the best way to express what he was going for with these pieces.

And yet, several composers and orchestrators have seen fit to adapt Debussy’s Préludes for orchestra. I’m only familiar with this version, orchestrated by Peter Breiner, and performed by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra under the baton of Jun Märkl. If it’s possible, the end result is both impressive and unnecessary, showing that Breiner is very capable of orchestrating music that never needed to be played by an orchestra.

The funny thing is that this is a fine recording, and I recommend it—sort of. The orchestra sounds very good, and the music is lovely. Peter Breiner’s orchestrations are generally quite good, and they avoid sounding overly ‘blocky’—the curse of orchestrating piano music—while perhaps being overly reliant on certain sonorities.

But you know what? I just did a side-by-side comparison between recordings of one of the greatest and most famous of the Préludes, “La cathédrale engloutie”, or “The Sunken Cathedral”. Compared to the piano rendition (by the aforementioned Paul Jacobs), the orchestral version sounds curiously stilted and muted, never quite achieving the extremes of subtlety and grandeur that is called for. Details get lost in the orchestral textures, and the whole thing comes off as being kind of lifeless. Some of the orchestrations certainly work better than others, but there isn’t a single one that I’d recommend over, or even compare all that favourably to, the original. I don’t blame Breiner, the orchestra, or the conductor. I blame the project as a whole. It’s probably as good as it could have been, but the problem is that it never had to be.

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