Debussy Fall of the House of Usher CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862 -1918) Text und Musik von Claude Debussy Nach Edgar Allan Poe Rekonstruktion und Orchestration von Robert Orledge Roderick Usher SCOTT HENDRICKS Capriccio DVD 93 517 (BREGENZER FESTSPIELE 2006) An interesting compilation aimed to give viability to Debussy's unfinished opera, which survives only in fragments. The completed first scene of Fall of the House of Usher (1908-1917) is completed by Juan Blin & Robert Orledge into an entertainment filmed here from Bregenz, and it does add something to the Debussy we know. There is strange sinister music for the melodrama leading towards the gory denouement - 'Lady Madeline escapes from her subterranean coffin and dies, drenched with blood, in her brother's arms...' Orledge drew upon the Caplet/Hoechlin completions of Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien etc, his task made no easier because Debussy's widow had given away pages of the Usher sketches as gifts to friends! Well worth disinterring, the Usher reconstruction shows Debussy moving towards 'a new and complex harmonic style' (Robert Orledge).The Bregenz version is give in haunting settings and, for opera followers, with very watchable choreography. It is presented in three scenes, with the DVD filled up with danced versions of L'APRES-MIDI D'UN FAUNE and JEUX. Navigation of the DVD is not the easiest, and I eventually found that Chapters 2 & 3 are reverse ordered, i.e. Jeux comes before L'Apres du Faune An oddity, but a worthwhile supplement to Pelleas et Melisande for collectors. Peter Grahame Woolf
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