Double double.(Claude Debussy: La Mer)(Sound Recording Review)

In this installment, Tom Lyle and I take comparative listens to a pair of highly regarded recordings of music that Tom and I both cherish by a composer we both admire but for some reason have not yet featured in this column. In 1995, conductor Pierre Boulez led the Cleveland Orchestra in a performance of Claude Debussy's La Mer (DG 439 896-2), a recording that was widely praised at the time for both its performance and its sound quality. Tom and I thought it would be both fun and instructive to compare that now-classic recording with a recent release on the Telarc label that features the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Paavo Jarvi (Telarc SACD-60617).

In keeping with the Sacred Code of the Audio Cowboy, Tom and I have abstained from discussing these two recordings with each other and have done our listening and writing completely independently. Because this is an odd-numbered issue, I will lead off with my findings and then Tom will close with his view of these two recordings. [Well that was the plan, anyway, but as it turns out, Tom and I apparently should have maybe discussed things a little more ...]

KWN: For me, this comparison was both enjoyable and quite frustrating. The enjoyable part was listening to this wonderful music, a composition that I have enjoyed ever since my first encounter with "classical" music, when my parents purchased a record player and a bunch of Reader's Digest LPs back in the mid-'60s. La Mer was one of my favorites from the orchestral box of recordings, and throughout my life it has been a piece that I always enjoy hearing, so to listen to it often in doing this comparison was not something I had to force myself to do.

The frustrating part was trying to choose between these two recordings, both of which are excellent. Ohio is blessed with two world-class orchestras, and both have been served well by the recording engineers. Choosing one recording over the other is extremely difficult.

If I had to make a thumbnail comparison, I would say that I might have a slight preference for the Boulez/Cleveland performance on DG, which strikes me as a marvel of precision. Every little strand of the work is laid out before your ears, yet it still sounds, well, "impressionistic." Still, the Jarvi/Cincinnati version is also marvelously played, and if anything, I slightly prefer the sound of the Telarc recording to that of the DG, as the Telarc strikes me as that last bit warmer and more realistic in sound. (Note that although I list the catalog number for the SACD version, it was the CD layer to which I actually listened--perhaps Santa will bring me a SACD player so I can see whether the SACD version sounds even better).

So there you have it: I slightly prefer the Boulez/Cleveland performance and the Jarvi/ Cincinnati sonic presentation, which makes it pretty well a dead draw. If one or the other were a budget-priced disc, that might be the tiebreaker, but both sell for the same price.

That leaves one more possible decision point for potential ...