What on earth could have motivated such a reliable and sophisticated label as MDG to release this redundant and artistically uninspiring disc? Marc Soustrot offers some of the most klutzy, ham-fisted conducting you’ll ever hear in this repertoire. Right from the affected opening of the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun you know you’re going to be in for a rough ride. “Expressive” rubato effects abound, killing all sense of forward impulse, disturbing the tranquility of the music’s calm sections but stubbornly failing to take advantage of the few opportunities Debussy offers for liveliness. Impressionistic this music may be, but flaccid and rhythmless it is not. The same observations hold true for the slightly better-conducted Martyrdom excerpts: tempos aren’t especially slow, but they sound so because Soustrot prevents any sense of accumulating momentum.
Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite seriously lacks color and a sense of fantasy. Here Soustrot plays the music straightforwardly but does nothing with its magical orchestration. The dialogue of Beauty and the Beast suffers from an overly reticent beast (contrabassoon), while the final apotheosis sounds particularly dark and heavy, the brilliant harp part covered in the general welter of sound. La Valse receives what may be the most boring yet mannered performance on disc. Listen to the way Soustrot stops the music dead in its tracks as the coda gets going (after the first big tam-tam crash), just when you want to whip it up into a frenzy. Great sonics conceal neither Soustrot’s complete absence of any positive ideas about how this music should go, nor the orchestra’s lack of panache and timbral glitter when the music needs it most. A non-starter.
