There weren’t very many students in that class, so we all had a serviceable view of the score, despite its fairly small dimensions. I had assigned them the second movement, “Cortège”—although it must be the most riotous cortège in the repertoire. Compare, however, what we saw on the page
SOURCE: scan of Ibert Divertissement (Durand, 1931, reprint n.d.), p. 17. |
with what we heard from the CD recording I had chosen for them—Yan Pascal Tortelier’s 1992 Chandos recording with the Ulster Orchestra [Chandos 9023]:
[I am very grateful to Chandos Records Ltd. for permission to use this excerpt for this post.]
I had heard this recording many times before. I am generally partial to Mr. Tortelier’s recordings. (Among his very many fine accomplishments, I would recommend particularly his recording of Guilmant’s Symphony no. 1 for organ and orchestra (with organist Ian Tracey and the BBC Philharmonic) [Chandos 9271]. It is a work that seldom gets played, but it gets a splendid airing on that disc, and—as it exists in two rather different versions (organ solo and organ with orchestra)—it will probably emerge sooner or later as the topic of a post on this blog.)) [ADDENDUM: it did.]
As I say, I had heard this recording many times, but apparently not with the score at hand. That morning in class I exclaimed, “Where is that horn part coming from?” As my students put it (in the vernacular), “WTF?”
Soon after class, I pulled a few other recordings off my shelves, but none of them had this extra horn line. (This figure happens twice: Reh. 6, and then again at Reh. 10 up a half-step; the horn part seemed the same in both places on the Tortelier recording.) There was nothing in the Chandos liner notes to indicate that this recording featured a new edition of the score. Anyway, I mentally filed it away to explore later.
Returning to it about two months ago, I was just as mystified as before. I investigated getting the performing materials on perusal to see if anything useful was there; but, as the US distributor is Boosey & Hawkes, that effort proved prohibitively expensive. Moreover, a more recent recording from Chandos—an excellent one with Neemi Järvi conducting the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande [CHAN 5168]—clearly manifests the text as printed in the Durand score.
[Again my thanks to Chandos Records Ltd. for permission to use these recorded excerpts for this post.]
I have not laid my hands on an item catalogued in Worldcat as a “neue Auflage” apparently issued by Durand in 2012, but—as will be seen below—it wouldn’t have solved the mystery even if it is a new edition rather than just a reprint. (It may well just be a re-setting using music notation software; no editor is listed. I’ve complained about that sort of thing before on this blog, with the Glazunov Saxophone Concerto as my example.)
I decided it couldn’t hurt to try to contact Mr. Tortelier directly, but what exactly was I asking him? I thought it best to transcribe what I thought I heard the horn playing, and I enlisted some other keen ears to give it a go. Here is what I could convince myself I heard:
’s agent and wondered if I would get any reply. A few weeks later it came, revealing that the source of this interpolation was his father, the esteemed Paul Tortelier (1914-1990), cellist, composer, and conductor.
Indeed the passage at Reh 6 for 8 bars as well as the one at Reh 10 for another 8 bars have an added and indeed optional horn part counterpoint which was added by my father Paul Tortelier and is none other than the main theme of rehearsal 2 ( trumpet pianissimo ) and tutti forte at 4 but in this instance it is funnily clashing with the same tune played in augmented values on trumpet and flute.Once he mentioned the melody at Reh. 2, I saw why the second bar of my transcription had been naggingly familiar. Here is Ibert's tune there (third staff, trumpet in C):
To answer your question and sum it up, my father is to blame for that and I assume it should be heard on his own recording with the English Chamber Orchestra. [email of 28 April 2018]
SOURCE: detail of scan of Ibert Divertissement (Durand, 1931, reprint n.d.), p. 12. |
SOURCE: Durand score p. 17 with Paul Tortelier's interpolated horn part in manuscript (by courtesy of Yan Pascal Tortelier, email 6 May 2018); for the parallel passage at Reh. 10, see this page. |
SOURCE: Tortelier père et fils recording Tchaikovsky in London in 1973, from EMI's 1981 Grand Echiquier reissue. |
All this prompted me to wonder, though, what other contrapuntal “Easter eggs” (to borrow a gaming term) are lurking on recordings of standard literature—whether intentional interpolations by the conductor or as pranks by the players. As a continuo player, I have in my realizations occasionally introduced a snippet from another work as a sort of countermelody. (I have found that the phrase “Way down upon the Swanee river” works particularly well.) I imagine others have amused themselves in similar ways. I would be happy to add an addendum to this post if readers can point me to other examples.