La mer | London Philharmonic Orchestra

High spirits and the high seas.

Debussy dreamed of being a sailor, and when he composed La mer he worried that he hadn’t done justice to the beauty of the sea. Conductor Dima Slobodeniouk disagrees, and Debussy’s symphonic seascape is a gorgeous complement to Sibelius’s musical vision of a sunlit Mediterranean. First, though, things get frisky with two young composers in a hurry: Prokofiev’s delightfully irreverent ‘Classical’ Symphony and Richard Strauss’s uproarious Burleske. Soloist Martin Helmchen is a pianist who’s not afraid to take risks, and this is definitely music to make you sit up.