Postlude: M.Croche

Colin Matthews had always intended to write a postlude to his arrangements of the Debussy Preludes but he waited until he had finished the last of them before he made a start on it. At that point, he says, ‘the only logical thing to do seemed to be to write a piano piece of my own and then transcribe it’. Conceived with a nice sense of authenticity though it was, however, the new piece ­– which takes its title from ‘Monsieur Croche,’ the nom de plume Debussy used when workng as a music critic in the 1900s – would be quite impossible to trace back to its keyboard origins. The ethereal passage for multi-divided strings about half-way through, for example, would make no sense in piano terms. That is just one of several vividly contrasted episodes which, held together by recurrences of the buzzing activity on trumpets and woodwind at the beginning, make up what Matthews describes as ‘part portrait of Debussy and part expression of exuberance and reflection on having completed the project.’ Clearly, he sees Debussy as a man of immense energy but also, as a congenial bassoon melody indicates at an early stage, of immense likeability and, as the string episode seems to suggest, visionary inspiration. In the brilliantly written coda, which has the structural function of tying together the various thematic strands, the sense of exuberance is unmistakable. Closer to Debussy’s own style than Matthews had ‘intended or expected,’ he says, M.Croche ‘was written as a gift and a thank you to Mark Elder and the Hallé, and is respectfully dedicated …à la mémoire d’un musicien français.’