Search - Debussy, Inghelbrecht, French Nat'l Radio Orch :: Martyr of St Sebastian / Ballades

LILIES AND LANGUORS

DAVID BRYSON | Glossop Derbyshire England | 01/03/2010

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This is a reissue of enormous interest and significance. Desire-Emile Inghelbrecht was closely associated with the earliest productions of Debussy's elusive Martyre de Saint Sebastien, and on this disc he directs the concert version that he himself prepared in 1955. In addition there are settings of three ballads of Villon that also seem rarities in performance, in recordings dating from 1958. The orchestra is the French Radio orchestra and it performs perfectly adequately both in the ballads whose scoring is presumably Debussy's alone, and in the main work, for which Debussy partly contracted out the orchestration to Andre Caplet. Apart from Bernard Plantey the baritone soloist in the ballads, the singers are not the crowning glory of this set. However there is a more important performer than all the other vocalists put together, it is the narrator Andre Falcon, and he is superb.



If Le Martyre is not atmospheric it is nothing, but it needs to be the right kind of atmosphere, and between them the conductor and the narrator have to ensure that. The work has some similarities to mediaeval morality plays, but it is not greatly concerned with morality. The resemblance is in having the characters largely depersonalised and instead embodying points of view, uttering abstract thoughts rather than acting in what we would normally think of as a drama. There is also a strong tinge of mysticism about Le Martyre, with the participants seemingly suspended above ordinary earthly thought-processes and seeking a closer union with deity in some form. What kind of union, and what kind of deity, are the things that have to be suggested by the narrator, and Falcon gets them just right for me.



In case anyone needs some background to the story, St Sebastian, whether or not he really existed, was a Roman soldier first promoted by the Emperor Diocletian, then sentenced to death by archery once his conversion to Christianity was discovered. In some versions of the story he survived the arrows and lived to be beaten to death later, but only after successfully converting certain others to Christianity. In the version that we have here his first ordeal is one of hot embers, and after the archery episode his soul has a solo, so obviously his bodily life is at an end. It is at this stage that he is declared a saint, and the work (or this edition of it) ends with the conventional heavenly choirs - martyrs, virgins, apostles, angels as in any Te Deum - praising the Lord and ending with a Hallelujah. This is as religious as it all gets, belatedly and in a rather token manner. There is certainly a lengthy quotation earlier from the story of the Agony in the Garden in St Matthew, but any references to Christ's crucifixion use that to highlight St Sebastian, not the other way about. This is what the director and the narrator have to understand, because attempts to make this story devotional will be futile. Early efforts at staging it met with the wrath of the Bishop of Paris, and understandably so. It is an affront to any traditional book-of-rules sex-averse Catholicism because it calls on the gospel to support a study in homoerotic longing.



Sebastian may become a saint, but that is only by way of rounding off the story and maybe to help escape ecclesiastical fury. What Le Martyre is really about is the St Sebastian of familiar portraiture - a beauteous youth whose wounds can give those with certain susceptibilities an extra frisson if the wounds are made to suggest the stigmata of the Crucifixion. That suggestion is made explicitly in the text, and invocations of Adonis are all part of it too. It starts among lilies and finishes (except for the Hallelujahs) among laurels, and the general atmosphere of it all was not missed by, say, Derek Jarman.



Andre Falcon does not miss the point either. His diction is of course a model of French clarity, but the important thing is that he does not try to tone down or sanctify what it is all about. His blatantly orgasmic cries of `Encore! Encore!...' in the fourth `Mansion' should leave nobody in the slightest doubt as to how he interprets his part. The three women singers are all right, I suppose, but nothing to write home about. The chorus risks letting the show down at times, and the first Chorus Seraphicus is really rather bad. Despite this, I don't want to reduce the star-rating from 5 because of the extraordinary historical significance of this release. It is excellent and more than excellent in the most important respects, namely the musical direction and the narration, and any slight problems I have with the chorus may be partly down to the (mono) recording, although I have to say that I find that very good in general too.



Villon is more to my own literary taste than all this sort of thing. I greatly enjoyed the three ballads, and to have these out-of-the-way numbers, very well sung by Plantey, on top of such an irreplaceably authentic Martyre is another reason for my fifth star. The Ballade des femmes de Paris even brings out some rarely detected humour in the composer. It made me wish he had also attempted my own beloved Ballade des dames de jadis, famous for its refrain `Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?' I suppose I can't have everything. Dictes-moi ou n'en quel pays I can have everything."