Ravel / Debussy
Ma Mère L'Oye (Mother Goose Suite) / Nocturnes / Ansermet

*NOTE: On side 2, Debussy's Nocturnes, there is a mark that plays lightly for approx. 90 seconds about 1/2 way into the first movement, "Nuages."

This vintage London pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn't showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to "see" the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It's what vintage all analog recordings are known for -- this sound.

If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it -- not often, and certainly not always -- but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.

What The Best Sides Of Ma Mère L'Oye (Mother Goose Suite) / Nocturnes Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear

• The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
• The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1958
• Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
• Natural tonality in the midrange -- with all the instruments having the correct timbre
• Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space

No doubt there's more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.

Copies with rich lower mids and nice extension up top did the best in our shootout, assuming they weren't veiled or smeary of course. So many things can go wrong on a record. We know, we've heard them all.

Top end extension is critical to the sound of the best copies. Lots of old records (and new ones) have no real top end; consequently, the studio or stage will be missing much of its natural air and space, and instruments will lack their full complement of harmonic information.

Tube smear is common to most vintage pressings. The copies that tend to do the best in a shootout will have the least (or none), yet are full-bodied, tubey and rich.

A Big Group of Musicians Needs This Kind of Space

One of the qualities that we don’t talk about on the site nearly enough is the SIZE of the record’s presentation. Some copies of the album just sound small -- they don’t extend all the way to the outside edges of the speakers, and they don’t seem to take up all the space from the floor to the ceiling. In addition, the sound can often be recessed, with a lack of presence and immediacy in the center.

Other copies -- my notes for these copies often read “BIG and BOLD” -- create a huge soundfield, with the music positively jumping out of the speakers. They’re not brighter, they’re not more aggressive, they’re not hyped-up in any way, they’re just bigger and clearer.

And most of the time those very special pressings are just plain more involving. When you hear a copy that does all that -- a copy like this one -- it’s an entirely different listening experience.

What We're Listening For On Ma Mère L'Oye (Mother Goose Suite) / Nocturnes

• Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
• The Big Sound comes next -- wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
• Then transient information -- fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
• Powerful bass -- which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
• Next: transparency -- the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
• Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing -- an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

Vinyl Condition

Mint Minus Minus and maybe a bit better is about as quiet as any vintage pressing will play, and since only the right vintage pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell. (The copies that are even a bit noisier get listed on the site are seriously reduced prices or traded back in to the local record stores we shop at.)

Those of you looking for quiet vinyl will have to settle for the sound of other pressings and Heavy Vinyl reissues, purchased elsewhere of course as we have no interest in selling records that don't have the vintage analog magic of these wonderful recordings.

If you want to make the trade-off between bad sound and quiet surfaces with whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing might be available, well, that's certainly your prerogative, but we can't imagine losing what's good about this music -- the size, the energy, the presence, the clarity, the weight -- just to hear it with less background noise.

Side One

• Ma Mère L'Oye (Mother Goose Suite) - Ravel
Prélude Et Danse Du Rouet
Pavane De La Belle Au Bois Dormant
Petit Poucet
Laideronnette, Impératrice Des Pagodes
Les Entretiens De La Belle Et De La Bête
Le Jardin Féerique

Side Two

• Nocturnes - Debussy
Nuages
Fêtes
Sirènes

About this Piece - Ma Mère L'Oye (Mother Goose Suite)

Whether to the never-never lands of the East (Shéhérazade), the cool beauty of Classical Greece (Daphnis et Chloé), or the innocent world of childhood as expressed in the works of 17th-century fairy-tale collector and writer Charles Perrault and his contemporaries (Tales of Mother Goose), Ravel was the ultimate musical escapist. The children—unlike the lands of his imaginings—were often real, he was comfortable with them, and they adored him in turn. This side of his nature is shown in the set of piano duets, Ma mère l’Oye, that he wrote in 1908 for young Mimi and Jean Godebski, whose parents, Ida and Cyprian (“Cipa”) Godebski, were among the few close friends the composer ever had.

Mimi would later write: “Ravel used to tell me marvelous stories. I would sit on his knee and he would begin, ‘Once upon a time...’ And it was Laideronnette, Beauty and the Beast, and the adventures of a poor mouse that he had made up for me. It was [at the Godebskis’ country home] that Ravel finished and presented us with Ma mère l’Oye. But neither my brother nor I were of an age to appreciate such a dedication and we regarded it rather as something that involved hard work.”

The piano duets were instead performed by two other children of the composer’s acquaintance, Jeanne Leleu and Geneviève Durony, in April 1910. In 1912 Ravel orchestrated the duets for a ballet, changing their order and adding numbers and transitions. He later adapted this into a concert suite, following the original piano-duet order:

Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty (Pavane de la Belle aus bois dormant) finds a princess who has been asleep for a hundred years, indicated by Ravel’s evocation of the long-ago through the use of an old Aeolian church mode and distantly tinkling chimes.

Tom Thumb (Petit Poucet) is headed by a quotation from Perrault’s story: “He believed he would have no difficulty finding his way by means of the bread crumbs he had strewn everywhere he had passed; but he was greatly surprised when he could not find a single crumb; the birds had come and eaten them all.” The character of Tom Thumb, and his winding path, are depicted by a solo oboe, with the chirping of the birds heard midway through.

Laideronnette, Empress of the Pagodas (Laideronnette, Impératrice des pagodes) derives its flavor from the use of the pentatonic scale. The story, by Perrault’s contemporary the Countess d’Aulnoy, tells of an “Ugly Little Girl,” under an enchantment by an evil witch, and a green serpent, once a handsome prince, who voyage to a country inhabited by the Pagodas, tiny beings whose bodies are made of jewels and porcelain. The Ugly Little Girl and the Green Serpent are eventually restored to their original—beautiful—forms and, of course, marry. The specific scene that Ravel describes reads: “She undressed and went into the bath. The Pagodas began to sing and play...some had theorbos [stringed instruments] made of walnut shells, some violas made of almond shells, for they were obliged to proportion their instruments to their figure.”

Conversations of Beauty and the Beast (Les entretiens de la Belle et de la bête) is in the form of a languorous waltz during which Beauty tells the Beast that his kindheartedness makes him no longer ugly.

The Fairy Garden (Le jardin féerique), the enchanted finale, in which Sleeping Beauty is awakened by Prince Charming, ends the score in a gorgeously sonorous wash of piano, harp, and celesta glissandos.

—Herbert Glass, LAPhil.com

About this Piece - Nocturnes

As with most composers of the late 19th and early 20th century, Claude Debussy’s musical imagination was fired by extra-musical stimuli. He composed few pieces of absolute music – pure music, not inspired by art, literature, or anything else – including a student symphony, a fantasy for piano and orchestra, a rhapsody for saxophone and orchestra, and the Études for piano. The Nocturnes, whose title doesn’t automatically take them out of the “absolute” category, were actually inspired by a set of paintings from the 1870s by American artist James McNeill Whistler. These artworks, also entitled Nocturnes, are studies in light and shade that offer an impression of landscapes and objects.

In fact, Debussy knew Whistler and several other artists – Toulouse-Lautrec and Gaugin among them – and was a great admirer of the work of J.M.W. Turner, whose canvases show a proto-impressionistic feeling for light similar to that found in Whistler’s Nocturnes. The composer went to London in 1903 to see Turner’s paintings, and once described the artist as “the greatest creator of mystery in art.” Debussy provided an introductory note to the Nocturnes that reveals the influence of these painters’ sensibilities on his own thinking, with its reliance on light, mystery, and impression to characterize his music.

“The title Nocturnes is to be interpreted here in a general and, more particularly, in a decorative sense. Therefore, it is not meant to designate the usual form of the Nocturne, but rather all the various impressions and the special effects of light that the word suggests. ‘Nuages’ (Clouds) renders the immutable aspect of the sky and the slow, solemn motion of the clouds, fading away in grey tones lightly tinged with white. ‘Fêtes’ (Festivals) gives us the vibrating, dancing rhythm of the atmosphere with sudden flashes of light. There is also the episode of the procession (a dazzling fantastic vision), which passes through the festive scene and becomes merged in it. But the background remains resistantly the same: the festival with its blending of music and luminous dust participating in the cosmic rhythm. ‘Sirènes’ (Sirens) depicts the sea and its countless rhythms and presently, amongst the waves silvered by the moonlight, is heard the mysterious song of the Sirens as they laugh and pass on.”

Debussy composed the Nocturnes between 1897 and 1899; the first two movements received their premiere in Paris, conducted by Camille Chevillard, on December 9, 1900. The first complete performance followed nearly a year later, on October 27, 1901. The work met a cool critical reception, and Debussy revised all three movements over the course of the rest of his life. In the case of “Sirènes,” he struggled especially with the women’s chorus included in the movement, tweaking the music to achieve a smoother blend of voices and orchestra. This instrumental use of voices is just one of the remarkable traits of the Nocturnes, which, at the time of their completion, comprised Debussy’s most ambitious orchestral work to date (La mer followed in 1905 and Images in 1913).

Debussy treats two themes in “Nuages,” one slow-moving and chordal (heard at the beginning of the movement), the other airier and more luminous (introduced by flute and harp). “Fêtes” is a rhythmically-driven depiction of the kind of rustic pleasures enjoyed by Debussy during his childhood in the Bois de Boulogne, a sprawling wooded park on the western edge of Paris. “Sirènes” abandons the thematic and rhythmic underpinnings of the two previous movements, instead relying on an ever-shifting atmosphere to conjure the sounds of the sea and the song of the mythical Sirens. The exoticism of the music stems, in part, from the influence of the Balinese gamelan, an orchestra of metallic percussion instruments that Debussy heard at the World Exposition in Paris in 1899. With “Neptune” from Holst’s The Planets, “Sirènes” is one of the most haunting uses of female voices to conclude a work, a radiant thread added to a gorgeous tapestry of sound.

—LAPhil.com