Symphonic Music

Moving from Palestrina to Boulez with stupefying ease, Spanish conductor Pablo Heras-Casado is interested in all music, beyond boundaries of epochs and styles. For this album, recorded as part of the publications planned by French label harmonia mundi to mark Debussy's centenary, Heras-Casado is conducting the famous London Philharmonic Orchestra, which, much like him, can happily play all sorts of music. It's a classic programme: the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, which shows off the splendour of Samuel Coles's flute, and La Mer, shimmering and diaphanous, but whose rising tide gracefully carries all before in the train of the the London orchestra's flamboyant brass. Rarer are the symphonic extracts from the The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, a somewhat ill-starred work, a kind of ballet-oratorio for solo vocalists, mixed choir and symphonic orchestra that Debussy had written for the dancer Ida Rubinstein, based on a fashionably outdated text by Gabriele D'Annunzio. The original work, in five acts, lasted five hours and was threatened with a ban by the Archbishop of Paris, who was shocked by the heathen representation of the young Sebastian, who resembled a beautiful Adonis. This transfiguration, in fact already made by many painters of the Italian Renaissance, was surely too much for the era, and the work had no success, in spite of the beauty of Debussy's music. Only the "symphonic fragments", recorchestrated by André Caplet, survived the shipwreck. © François Hudry/Qobuz

With one of the very best orchestras in the world, the Budapest Festival Orchestra, one of today’s most fascinating conductor, Iván Fischer, offers one of the most beautiful recent interpretations of Mendelssohn’s integral A Midsummer Night's Dream. In other words: first the Overture, the phenomenal stroke of genius of a seventeen-year-old – one can only wonder where he discovered all of these orchestral inventions, as in 1826, templates were still rare and Berlioz had yet to enter the musical scene. Afterwards, the remaining pieces were composed sixteen years later for the theatrical presentation of Shakespeare’s play with musical interludes: thirteen very diverse pieces, ranging from the fabulous Scherzo − a masterpiece of finesse and orchestral invention – to delicious singing moments, as well as a pre-Mahler funeral march (reminiscent of Frère Jacques from Mahler’s Symphony No. 1), the overly well-known wedding march, the grotesque dance, and many more. There is little doubt that this is, if not Mendelssohn’s greatest masterpiece, at least one of his absolute pinnacle works. Presented here in a truly irresistible interpretation. © SM/Qobuz