George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra's Debussy - La Mer
La Mer is a tricky piece. It's not a symphony, it's not a symphonic poem, it's not "impressionistic," it's not what Debussy was known for writing up to this point, and nobody had much nice to say about it until he conducted it himself. The general reception ran along the lines of "how the hell is this 'the sea?' It's just half an hour of scribbley nonsense."
I'm sure it won't shock you that i find classical music criticism even more odious than rock criticism. Let's ignore them and take a more bottle approach.
It took a year of looking at Japanese paintings and daydreaming of childhood memories for Debussy to write it, and for him that was a rush job. He didn't want it to be an actual symphony, but he didn't want it to be overly pretentious fluff either. What have you got to work with? Waves? Light? An unpredictably violent briny death? Mermaids? I can hear all that in there, same as any Disney apprentice tracer. More importantly, the sea has it's own moods and men can never control or predict them. On that score, it's brilliant. The movements don't follow a formula, they just unfold; things happen, other things happen afterward, there's continuity for sure, but no immediately observable logic. The calm is not actually calm, it's a tense vibration waiting to explode. We are fascinated by the sea because we cannot truly inhabit it. We can endure it, harvest from it, explore it, traverse it, but it will always be a force that we cannot control. Everything in the piece happens in waves and ripples.
I hate the way it ends, but i don't have a better suggestion. It has to stop at some point, and big crescendo with a plop is a pretty standard "it's over."
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