"La Mer", by Claude Debussy

Watch this video of a performance of La Mer by the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Valery Gergiev, recorded in March, 2007



Compare that version to this one, recorded 29 December 1941, on a Columbia 78rpm Set MM 531 (XCO 32293-32298) by the Cleveland Orchestra, Artur Rodzinski, conductor. This recording is available at The Internet Archive, under a Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0


Now, listen (and download if you'd like,) to Fred Child, host of American Public Media's Performance Today, and Ted Libbey, author of the NPR Guide to Building a Classical Music Library, discuss, "Debussy's most concentrated and brilliant orchestral work, La Mer," what they deem as, "one of the supreme achievements in the symphonic literature."


This is an animation created by Ali Habashi set to 'Dialogue du vent et de la mer'
(Dialogue of the wind and the sea) from "La Mer" by Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
Thomas M. Sleeper, conductor, University of Miami Symphony Orchestra. It's from the Internet Archive. The film is courtesy of the Edward H Arnold Center for Confluent Media Studies at the University of Miami


If you'd like to compare Debussy with the real thing, listen to the sounds from this video (there is no video)