Hitting the high notes

Claude Debussy died on 25 March 1918 to the sound of explosions. Four days earlier, the Kaiser’s army had deployed its long-range Paris Gun, and as Debussy’s cancer entered its final hours, artillery shells were bursting in the streets around his home in Avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne. This quiet modernist — who’d transformed music into an art of almost limitless expressive subtlety — died amid the thunder of mechanised war. The funeral was poorly attended, and as the cortège halted, curious shopkeepers glanced at the wreaths: ‘It seems he was a musician.’

The classical music world is morbidly addicted to anniversaries of major composers. It’s still unclear whether the listening public feels the same way, and many anniversary celebrations try to fabricate an unearned sense of occasion around music that would have been played anyway (the memory of 2011’s Mahler feeding frenzy still brings on indigestion). That can’t be said for Debussy, whose revolution of sensibility has never quite lodged in the general imagination the way (say) Stravinsky’s has.

The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s Debussy Festival, taking place over two busy weekends (16–18 and 23–25) in March, is the first really sizeable statement from the orchestra’s new music director Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla. The most obvious bases are covered — La mer, Images and virtually all the chamber music — but there’s no sense of an exercise in completism. Instead, with music ranging from Wagner and Szymanowski to Boulez, Takemitsu and Tristan Murail, the festival attempts to map Debussy’s place in musical history. It’s all informed by Grazinyte-Tyla’s instinct for drawing musical connections, and she follows up on 23 June with a concert performance of Pelléas et Mélisande.

That’s easily the UK’s most ambitious Debussy commemoration, though the London Symphony Orchestra has an Essential Debussy strand, which includes the British première of a short orchestral suite by the student Debussy (21 January).