Nicolas Horvath’s Album of “Unknown” Debussy

courtesy of Naxos of America

Those that spent their lockdown time with the free opera streams provided by the San Francisco Opera (SFO) through their Opera is ON service may recall that one of the offerings from this past April was the video document of the program entitled The Fall of the House of Usher. This was a “double bill” program of two one-act operas, both based on the same story by Edgar Allan Poe (the source of the title of the opera program) and both about one hour in duration. The first of these was Gordon Getty’s “Usher House,” which was an impressive interpretation of Poe by a living (and local) composer.

The second was more unexpected. Back in 2016 I wrote about a two-CD album released by PAN CLASSICS presenting two one-act operas by Claude Debussy, both based on tales of Edgar Allen Poe. The first of these was “The Devil in the Belfry;” and the second was “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Neither of these operas was completed at the time of Debussy’s death in 1918. The “Usher” opera was structured in two scenes. Debussy had completed a short-score draft of the first and only portions were available of the second.

Enter Debussy scholar and “creative musicologist” Robert Orledge. He prepared a performing edition of both of the operas. These were then given recorded performances for the release of that CD album. There was also a staged performance of the “Usher” opera that was released as a Capriccio DVD. The SFO performances took place in December of 2015, described as an “American professional premiere.”

Since reconstructing “Usher,” Orledge has continued to research Debussy’s sketches and incomplete drafts. Many of those reconstructions have been realized for solo piano. Almost two months ago pianist Nicolas Horvath drew upon Orledge’s scholarship to record an album for the Grand Piano label entitled The Unknown Debussy – Rare piano music. Orledge’s hand is acknowledged for thirteen of the sixteen tracks on the CD. The other three are preliminary versions of familiar compositions, which were later revised into the versions that are now well known to most lovers of Debussy’s music.

Prior to the release of this album, I had not encountered any Debussy recordings by Horvath. Readers may know that I have been following his project to record the music of Philip Glass for Grand Piano, and I wrote about the sixth volume in this series in January of 2020. His latest Grand Piano release was the world premiere recording of Music for Piano XL by one of my favorite composers, Alvin Lucier. One does not tend to associate Debussy with either Glass or Lucier. However, it is clear from this new album that Horvath has a solid command of that composer’s technical and rhetorical devices, solid enough to bring the flesh and blood of performance to Orledge’s scholarly documents.

Mind you, I am fairly confident that most listeners are perfectly happy with “standard Debussy” recordings; but, at the very least, Orledge’s recording provides some intriguing insights regarding some of the “roads not taken” by the composer.