“There is only one word for this work, this performance, and this recording, and that is – ravishing”: Deryck Cooke on Monteux’s Daphnis in these pages in December 1959. It is fascinating, almost four decades and dozens of rival recordings on, to try to work out why it still retains its unique spell. Needless to say, it is a combination of factors. First and foremost, there is the understanding of a man who conducted the work’s premiere in 1912 and had lived with it for the intervening 47 years; an understanding that extended to an appreciation of the piece as a ‘choreographic symphony’ (Ravel’s description), and to – as Roland-Manuel put it – Ravel’s “boldest ideas [as] shaped in the classical mould”.
It might surprise you to learn, bearing in mind Monteux’s famously deliberate pacing of the pirates’ dance and especially the final bacchanale, that his Daphnis is among the quickest (maybe the quickest) on disc: some five minutes faster overall than, for example, Rattle, Haitink (Philips, 8/90 – nla) and Nagano. This is not a dry statistic; it tells you something about Monteux’s judiciously narrow range of tempos: where many modern conductors try to out-ravish each other with ever more lingering tempos, or outrun each other with ever more whirlwind ones – not to mention similarly extreme contrasts of dynamics – Monteux keeps a tight ship in full view, on its toes, and a balmy breeze in its sails. Specific benefits of the steady bacchanale, to take just two examples, include our recognizing the cowherd Dorcon when he reappears to join in the fun (in most performances, blink, and you miss him, or to put it another way, the pace is so fast that you don’t relate what you are hearing to his original appearance), and the chorus’s ability to properly articulate their grace notes in their final shouts – “shouts of truly Bacchic frenzy” as DC put it.
That is the framework. Within it there is an extraordinary range of beautifully wrought rubato. Can you honestly say that you’ve heard more supple and varied pacing of the long flute solo in the “Pantomime”? Admittedly, there are occasions (infrequent ones) where ensemble for some of this variety might have benefited from a touch more rehearsal (a year or two further into Monteux’s relationship with the LSO, for example, in the couplings here, or Monteux’s other Ravel recordings on Philips, and ensemble is more consistent).
Then there is the perennial fraicheur exquise of the reading, as much a matter of the style of playing as the limpid, diaphanous recorded sound. I’ll wager that orchestral string players these days don’t really know how to negotiate some of Ravel’s more voluptuous curves without the result sounding like a sticky cinematic cliche. Monteux knew. But then the French have always been masters of the art of subtle, graceful and playful erotic suggestion (Charles Munch’s more impetuous but equally classic 1955 Boston Daphnis is another case in point).
Last but not least, there is John Culshaw’s production, in which every individual glint or swirl of colour is caught to perfection: Monteux occasionally relocates harp glissandos, or for instance, will upgrade trombone and tuba parts at a moment you might think completely inappropriate, but they all work like a dream. There is also a wind machine that sounds like a zephyr and not a blizzard. And Culshaw’s location of the chorus’s first entry “derriere la scene” immediately establishes a spatial frisson which I have not heard equalled in any other recording (thereafter one might note moments when they are either too close or masked, but never seriously so). The positioning – and timing – of the brass interjections in the ‘interlude’ leading to the pirates’ dance are faultless.
This reissue preserves Monteux’s equally priceless Rapsodie and Pavane, as did its previous incarnation in Decca’s Historic series. The sound for all three pieces has now acquired fractionally more space around it, and perhaps a smoother top and better bass definition and extension. The differences are extremely small; it may even be my imagination. Very obvious indeed, though, is that the final chord of Daphnis has now lost its previous measure of reverberation.'