Quatuor Voce

Poetics of the Instant, Vol. 1

Quartet Voce

Sarah Dayan, violin [Violin 1, Tracks 1-4]

Cécile Roubin, violin [Violin 1, Tracks 8-14]

Guillaume Becker, viola

Lydia Shelley, cello

Jodie Devos, soprano

Juliette Hurel, flute

Emmanuel Ceysson, harp

The art of Claude Debussy (1862-1918) is irreducibly modern. To evoke the delicate, sophisticated harmonies, mysterious resonances and subtle timbres, the suspensions to which the supple outbursts of voluptuous arabesques respond, the poetry of nature, reverie or ancient melodies, a model of unique metrical flexibility, the incomparable combination of tonal, modal or exotic scales, or even his refined literary universe, is hardly enough to penetrate the aesthetics of the master of La Mer: The complex interplay of multiple compositional parameters makes his work fundamentally ambivalent and resistant to theorisation. The composer and musicologist André Boucourechliev (1925-1997) has coined a number of suggestive formulas in an attempt to characterise him. The phrase ‘poetics of the instant’ - chosen by the Voce quartet as the exergue of this recording - points to what he sees as Debussy's ‘locus of modernity’: musical time. His musical forms, evading univocal perception, harbour a singular conformation of time, punctuated by ephemeral points of tension between the emotion of the moment and awareness of the passage of time. 

Chamber music works are rare in Debussy's catalogue, compared with symphonic music, melodies and works for solo piano, which are the privileged sites of his invention. Two masterpieces in this genre, composed at the extremes of his career, are included in the programme of this recording: the String Quartet, premiered in 1893 at the Société Nationale de Musique in Paris when he was thirty-one, and the Sonata for flute, viola and harp, composed in 1915. Along with the Sonata for Cello and Piano and the Sonata for Violin and Piano, the latter is one of his last works.