Dolce Suono's "Debussy and Jazz'

"The century of aeroplanes deserves its own music," Claude Debussy once wrote. "As there are no precedents, I must begin anew."

For inspiration, Debussy turned to contemporary sources like jazz and the Asian art forms that the French encountered during the colonial era.

Dolce Suono's season opener— the first act in their season-long celebration of Debussy's 150th birthday— focused on the composer's relationship with jazz. The rest of Dolce Suono's 2012-13 schedule will be devoted to other aspects of Debussy's legacy.

The opening program combined artistic and scholarly depth with first-class entertainment and interludes of sheer fun. It included three pieces by Debussy himself, but Dolce Suono's artistic director, flutist Mimi Stillman, expanded its mandate to survey the whole relationship between jazz and classical music that Debussy championed.

Comic competition

The dalliance with jazz received its most entertaining expression in Claude Bolling's Suite for Flute and Jazz Trio, written for the great 20th-Century flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal. In the opening section Stillman engaged in a comic contest with percussionist Gabriel Globus-Hoenich and pianist Charles Abramovic.

Stillman opened the movement with a flute solo that could have been lifted from a Baroque sonata and valiantly persisted while her partners kept responding with bluesy nightclub riffs. They steadily intruded on her solo as the movement progressed, and the encounter ended with a satisfying fusion of both styles.

The remaining three movements ranged from the long, arching lines of a movement marked "Sentimental" to a fugue based on a frantic, 90-mile-an-hour theme that would never have occurred to Bach.

Saxophone's lament

The guest for the afternoon was composer/saxophonist Matthew Levy, of the Prism saxophone quartet. The program premiered new arrangements of three of Levy's pieces. Levy and Charles Abramovic also played the longest Debussy on the program, the 1903 Rhapsody for Saxophone and Piano.

The saxophone arrived on the scene after the modern orchestra had settled into its permanent shape, and never quite made it into the classical mainstream. But it's a beautiful instrument, with much of the poetic quality of the horn, and Levy's pieces proved that he understands its ability to create magical worlds in the same way the horn does.

Pianist Charles Abramovic turned in a connoisseur's performance, producing a steady stream of moods and commentary throughout the afternoon and providing the precise degree of strength, lightness, or nuance that each work required.

Eccentric project

The other Debussy works on the program were a pair of miniatures— the Golliwog's Cakewalk for piano (which Debussy wrote for a children's suite) and Syrinx, his two-and-a-half minute masterpiece for unaccompanied flute.

Syrinx added another lap to a yearlong marathon that Mimi Stillman launched in Israel on Debussy's birthday (August 22). She's playing it every day, wherever she is in her travels, and posting the videos on her website, mimistillman.org.


This project struck me as an eccentric idea when I first heard about it, but I checked out the video recorded at this concert, and ended up watching most of the ten versions currently available. So be warned.

The program ended in high style, with the combo romping through two ragtime pieces: Jelly Roll Morton's The Pearls and a Dolce Suono treatment of William Albright's arrangement of That Saxophone Rag, by Rowland Fixel and Sylvan Grosner. The musicians donned fedoras for the rag and evoked the period's aura in the same way Piffaro puts Renaissance music in context with bits of appropriate staging.

Abramovic didn't play his part with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, but we all know there are limits to our attempts to reproduce authentic historical performance practice.