82 THENEWYORKER,M AY4, 2020
Ólafsson’s playing of Debussy is astonishingly exact and clear, almost translucent.
MUSICAL EVENTS
RALLY OF THE BIRDS
New recordings, by the pianist Víkingur Ólafsson and by the composer Liza Lim.
BY ALEX ROSS
ILLUSTRATION BY SIGGI EGGERTSSON
“
T
he blessed damozel leaned out/
From the gold bar of Heaven.”
Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s lines caught
the attention of Claude Debussy in
1887, when the composer was twenty-
five. His setting of “The Blessed Da-
mozel,” in the form of the orchestral
cantata “La Damoiselle Élue,” is
among his first fully characteristic
works, opening a door to a landscape
of unearthly radiance. The prelude
begins with a spare procession of iso-
lated harmonies: E minor, D minor,
C major, D minor. The key of C is
the apparent home ground of the
piece, but for some thirty bars we wan-
der through various adjacent tonali-
ties and ambiguous zones, in a nar-
cotizing haze.
Finally, at the beginning of a pas-
sage marked “Un peu animé,” o r “A
bit animated,” C major arrives—but
it, too, feels new. The music could not
be simpler, with a lilting, rising-and-
falling melody over block chords, but
the addition of B’s and A’s to the har-
mony, flavorings tart and sweet, con-
jures the café and the cabaret, not
to mention jazz clubs and lounges
that had yet to come into existence.
Four bars later, Debussy falls back on
a stark E-minor chord that has a
vaguely medieval quality, as if this
torch song of the future were being
performed in a cold room in an an-
cient castle.
I’d heard “La Damoiselle Élue”
several times over the years, but a
recent rendition of the prelude, by the
young Icelandic pianist Víkingur
Ólafsson, made me listen anew. It ap-
pears on an album titled “Debussy
Rameau,” on the Deutsche Grammo-
phon label. Ólafsson plays Debussy’s
own transcription of the work for
piano, and it sounds more modern
than the orchestral version, which
has traces of Wagner’s “Parsifal.” The
pianist’s technique is astonishingly
exact and clear, almost translucent.
He avoids ostentatiously rolled chords,
misty articulation, blurry pedalling,
and other atmospherics in which De-
bussy is too often smothered. There
is a gentle sway to the rhythm, as
though a steady breeze were pushing
the music forward.
Even more wonderful is what hap-
pens next. Ólafsson segues from the
prelude’s final, inconclusive E octave
to “Le Rappel des Oiseaux,” or “The
Rally of the Birds,” a delicately swirl-
ing piece by Jean-Philippe Rameau.
It was written more than a hundred
and sixty years before “La Damoi-
selle Élue,” but there is little sense of
a sharp stylistic break—a sign both
of Rameau’s forward-thinking, free-
wheeling imagination and of Debussy’s
acute consciousness of the French
past. Ólafsson inevitably modernizes
Rameau’s music by transferring it
from the harpsichord, for which it
was written, but the dancing delicacy
of his touch prevents any encroach-
ment of Romantic heaviness.
Debussy once said of Rameau’s
opera “Castor et Pollux” that it is “so
personal in tone, so new in construc-
tion, that space and time are defeated
and Rameau seems to be a contempo-
rary.” The same sense of historical col-
lapse takes hold as one listens to Ólafs-
son’s recital, which switches back and
forth between Rameau’s “Pièces de
Clavecin”—among them “The Rally
of the Birds”—and selections from
Debussy: the Préludes, “Estampes,”
“Children’s Corner,” “Images.” The id-
iomatic brilliance of the playing and
the ingenuity of the programming com-
