Topic: Clair de Lune by Claude Debussy

[Nichi]

For most of my life, I ignored "Debussy" as far too romantic for my tastes. But recently, I rediscovered this piece and am enchanted.

This particular rendition is conducted by Leopold Stokowski, who was a very influential conductor in the first half of the 20th century. (More on him later.) It was recorded in 1940 for the Disney movie, "Fantasia", but they deleted the scene. So, if you give this a gander, consider that the fidelity is pretty old.  This is the deleted scene...

<span data-s9e-mediaembed="youtube" style="display:inline-block;width:100%;max-width:640px"><span style="display:block;overflow:hidden;position:relative;padding-bottom:56.25%"><iframe allowfullscreen="" loading="lazy" scrolling="no" style="background:url(https://i.ytimg.com/vi/fLSzlBaU3jM/hqdefault.jpg) 50% 50% / cover;border:0;height:100%;left:0;position:absolute;width:100%" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fLSzlBaU3jM"></iframe></span></span><br /><a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/fLSzlBaU3jM" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/fLSzlBaU3jM</a>

[Nichi]

Excerpts from Wiki on Leopold Stokowski...

Leopold Anthony Stokowski (18 April 1882 – 13 September 1977) was a British conductor. One of the leading conductors of the early and mid-20th Century, he is best known for his long association with the Philadelphia Orchestra and for appearing in the film Fantasia. He was especially noted for his free-hand conducting style that spurned the traditional baton and for obtaining a characteristically sumptuous sound from the orchestras he directed.

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Stokowski rapidly gained a reputation as a musical showman. His flair for the theatrical included grand gestures such as throwing the sheet music on the floor to show he did not need to conduct from a score. He also experimented with new lighting arrangements in the concert hall,[3] at one point conducting in a dark hall with only his head and hands lighted, at other times arranging the lights so they would cast theatrical shadows of his head and hands. Late in the 1929-30 symphony season, Stokowski started conducting without a baton. His free-hand manner of conducting soon became one of his trademarks.

On the musical side, Stokowski nurtured the orchestra and shaped the "Stokowski" sound, or what became known as the "Philadelphia Sound". He encouraged "free bowing" from the string section, "free breathing" from the brass section, and continually altered the seating arrangements of the orchestra's sections, as well as the acoustics of the hall, in response to his urge to create a better sound. Stokowski is credited as being the first conductor to adopt the seating plan that is used by most orchestras today, with first and second violins together on the conductor's left, and the violas and cellos to the right. (Preben Opperby's 1982 Stokowski biography reproduces, on page 127, four of Stokowski's various seating plans, of which illustration No. 2 shows the string sections as here described).

Stokowski also became known for modifying the orchestrations of some of the works that he conducted, as was a standard practice for conductors prior to the second half of the 20th Century. Among others, he amended the orchestrations of Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Brahms. For example, Stokowski revised the ending of the Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture, by Tchaikovsky, so that it would close quietly, taking his notion from Modest Tchaikovsky's Life and Letters of Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky (translated by Rosa Newmarch: 1906) that the composer had provided a quiet ending of his own at Balakirev's suggestion. Stokowski made his own orchestration of Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain by adapting Rimsky-Korsakov's orchestration and making it sound, in some places, similar to Mussorgsky's original. In the film Fantasia, to conform to the Disney artists' story-line, depicting the battle between good and evil, the ending of Night on Bald Mountain segued into the beginning of Schubert's Ave Maria.

Many music critics have taken exception to the liberties Stokowski took—liberties which were common in the nineteenth century, but had mostly died out in the twentieth, when faithful adherence to the composer's scores became more common.[5] However, Stokowski often left scores completely unretouched, particularly those many hundreds of new works which he was conducting for the first time. On the other hand, he was by no means alone in his alterations to more familiar scores. Arturo Toscanini, for example, who had a reputation for "doing as written", was equally adept at making similar changes to composers' scores, as in Tchaikovsky's Manfred Symphony, where Toscanini added tam-tam crashes to the end of the first movement, rewrote the wind, brass, and string parts here and there, and cut 100 bars out of the finale. Toscanini's alterations, however, tended to be more subtle and less frequent than Stokowski's.

Stokowski's repertoire was broad and included many contemporary works. He was the only conductor to perform all of Arnold Schoenberg's orchestral works during the composer's own lifetime, several of which were world premieres. Stokowski gave the first American performance of Schoenberg's Gurre-Lieder in 1932. It was recorded "live" on 78 rpm records and remained the only recording of this work in the catalog until the advent of the LP album. Stokowski also presented the American premieres of four of Dmitri Shostakovich's symphonies, Numbers 1, 3, 6, and 11. In 1916, Stokowski conducted the American premiere of Mahler's 8th Symphony, Symphony of a Thousand. He added works by Rachmaninoff to his repertoire, giving the world premieres of his Fourth Piano Concerto, the Three Russian Songs, the Third Symphony, and the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini; Sibelius, whose last three symphonies were given their American premieres in Philadelphia in the 1920s; and Igor Stravinsky, many of whose works were also given their first American performances by Stokowski. In 1922, he introduced Stravinsky's score for the ballet The Rite of Spring to America, gave its first staged performance there in 1930 with Martha Graham dancing the part of The Chosen One, and at the same time made the first American recording of the work.

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See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Stokowski

[Nichi]

"Clair de Lune" = light of the moon, or, moonlight.

[Michael]

Very pretty - one wonders how they did that in those days. I can only assume it was all hand drawn.

[Nichi]

Very pretty - one wonders how they did that in those days. I can only assume it was all hand drawn.

That's what I always heard --- frame by frame.

[Nichi]

Here's an exclusively-piano version by Emil Gilels
<span data-s9e-mediaembed="youtube" style="display:inline-block;width:100%;max-width:640px"><span style="display:block;overflow:hidden;position:relative;padding-bottom:56.25%"><iframe allowfullscreen="" loading="lazy" scrolling="no" style="background:url(https://i.ytimg.com/vi/aBUSYlqFRjQ/hqdefault.jpg) 50% 50% / cover;border:0;height:100%;left:0;position:absolute;width:100%" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aBUSYlqFRjQ"></iframe></span></span><br /><a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/aBUSYlqFRjQ" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/aBUSYlqFRjQ</a>