Let’s be direct: the Debussy late sonatas are among the most treacherous works in the chamber repertoire, and most recordings of them sound as though the performers know it. The caution is audible — in the over-beautified tone, the slightly-too-careful ensemble blend, the reluctance to let these pieces be as strange and skeletal as they actually are. The Nash Ensemble, celebrating their sixtieth anniversary with this Hyperion release, have no such inhibitions.
The three sonatas Debussy completed in the last years of his life — the Cello Sonata, the Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp, and the Violin Sonata — are not impressionist mood-paintings. They are the work of a composer in physical decline, writing with furious concentration, stripping everything back to the essential. Too many recordings forget this. The Nash don’t. Adrian Brendel’s cello playing in the Cello Sonata is muscular, unsentimental, and rhythmically alive in ways that make gentler versions sound half-asleep. The Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp is given without any of the usual atmospheric floating — this is music with bones, and they let you hear them. And Stephanie Gonley’s violin in the G minor Sonata is a controlled marvel: the silvery tone is there, but it never tips into prettiness for its own sake. The finale, which Debussy described as “full of tumultuous joy,” actually sounds tumultuous here.
The String Quartet opens the disc and earns its place: this is not a warm-up. The Nash shape the first movement’s cross-rhythms with a clarity that throws the music’s formal ingenuity into relief, and the scherzo’s pizzicato is precisely the kind of moment where lesser ensembles coast and great ones commit.
Then there’s the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune — arranged by oboist and composer David Walter for twelve players. You can argue all day whether this repertoire needs a chamber arrangement. Stop arguing. It earns its existence completely, with a textural intimacy that the full orchestral version simply can’t achieve at any dynamic level. The famous opening flute solo gains in vulnerability what it concedes in spaciousness, and the way the twelve musicians breathe the piece’s slow dissolves is not a trick but a revelation.
Andrew Keener’s production and Oscar Torres’s engineering at All Saints’ Church, East Finchley — long one of Hyperion’s most reliable spaces — are as fine as you’d expect: present, unforced, and in service of the music rather than the microphones.
My Favorite Moment
The second movement of the Violin Sonata — marked “fantasque et léger” — is the passage I always use to take the temperature of a performance. Its mood shifts from playfulness to introspection within single phrases, and most violinists iron out the seams. Gonley doesn’t. There’s a moment roughly two-thirds through where the energy simply evaporates mid-phrase, dies to almost nothing, and then refuses to recover in the way you expect. It’s a small thing on paper. On this recording it sounds like a door closing very quietly on something irreplaceable. Debussy knew he was dying. This performance seems to know it too.
Comparisons
For the late sonatas in a more intimate, mercurial reading, the Augmented Piano Quartet’s Erato recordings from the 1990s remain formidable. Frank Peter Zimmermann’s Violin Sonata in particular has a quicksilver quality that makes even very good alternatives sound a degree earthbound.
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For the String Quartet, the Quatuor Ébène’s Virgin Classics recording from 2008 set a high bar for rhythmic intensity that still hasn’t been entirely dislodged. The Nash are more warmly recorded and no less committed, but the Ébène’s controlled ferocity in the scherzo remains something to reckon with.
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