For whatever reason, of late I've been listening to a lot of Debussy orchestral music in various recordings, ranging from the 1930s to the present. Debussy elicits great playing from orchestras as a rule; all those solo passages and the overall collage-like texture is a great inducement for players to do their very best.
Ditto conductors. One particular piece that serves for me as a Debussyean litmus test is the third of the orchestral Nocturnes—"Sirènes", that gloriously erotic audio canvas inspired by the sirens of The Odyssey. Perched on their rocky island in the Aegean Sea, they sing come-thither exhortations to passing sailors, tempting them to come closer, closer, closer—and then whap on the rocks and it's goodbye sailors.
Debussy threw a monkey wrench into the works with his orchestration of Sirènes. He requires a wordless women's chorus for just this one movement, the third of the three Nocturnes. And it is the only place in his orchestral output that such a chorus is required. As a result, one gets the distinct impression that record producers dread having to record Sirènes, given the extra cost associated with a women's chorus for one single track. That's why a lot of condensed Nocturnes happen—you get Nuages and Fêtes, but no Sirènes.
Maybe the chorus just doesn't get enough rehearsal. In most cases you figure they're coming in for a single service. A lot of them sound like they don't have a clue as to what they're really supposed to be doing. Maybe somebody tells them: sound sexy. But they stuff them so far back in the texture that they could be singing like bored line chefs and nobody would be much the wiser. That's a problem with the otherwise marvelous André Previn outing with the LSO.
Or they come off sounding kind of like a bunch of cheap hookers calling out to passing cars at Hollywood and Vine. (Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra committed that little faux pas in their 1955 monophonic outing, except that their hookers inexplicably turn into a Cecil B. DeMille chorus when they get louder.)
Maybe they should avoid sounding like ingenues. I love Mark Elder's Debussy outings with the Hallé, but dammit, those sopranos are just too English prep school. It's called Sirènes, not Lolita.
I really don't want them sounding like Rhinemaidens, either. Thus Jean Martinon with the French National on EMI; one of the fastest traversals on record, splendid in its sense of urgency. But man alive do those collective Brünnhildes mean business. I imagine them in combat gear, rifles at the ready.
Another trope is merrily tripping along ladies who sound as though they've slipped out of the chorus of HMS Pinafore. (Paul Paray and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, captured in Mercury Living Presence's you-are-there audio.) I guess they're going to two-step all those sailors to death.
Then there are the sexless ones, the perfectly-poised and coiffed and elegant sopranos. Can't imagine them luring anybody to destruction. That's an issue with both of Pierre Boulez's finely tooled outings, one with the Philharmonia Orchestra and the other in Cleveland. Utterly admirable performances, to be sure. But no sexy.
Once in a while somebody gets it just right. Bernard Haitink and the Concertgebouw in 1976 places them wonderfully—distant but not too muted, sultry but not vulgar, women and not girls, supported immeasurably by one of the most tonally effulgent orchestras on the planet.
A near-ideal, at least for me, comes from an unlikely source: Lan Shui conducting the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, on BIS. The chorus is fairly forward, but not so much as to dominate, and instead of sounding tacked-on and last-minute, they are indisputably part of the orchestra and are of a mind with it. Another section of the orchestra, in other words. All in all, a dazzling achievement and one of the most satisfying modern recordings of this elusive work I know. But then again, I'm not all that surprised: those folks in Singapore have been working some discographic miracles over the past decade.
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