Maybe reviewers fuss too much about couplings, but in this case, with the Prelude a l'apresmidi dun faune these days extending the timings of virtually every Debussy issue, and with nearly two decades separating it from the later Jeux and La boite a joujoux, as well as it not being a ballet—oh, all right: it may have been conceived for the stage, and was choreographed (and vulgarized) by Nijinsky in 1912—surely a more enterprising choice in keeping with the theme would have been the contemporary and unjustly neglected ballet Khamma. With the standard of performance on offer here, that would indeed have formed a cherishable disc. As it happens, Tilson Thomas's Prelude is very fine: richly drawn and, compared to the recent versions from Boulez (DG) and Solti (Decca), traditionally drawn out, long-breathed and languorous. Overloud horns in the fourth bar would seem to forecast fog, not heat-haze; in other respects the balance (from EMI's Abbey Road Studio No. 1) is good, with integrated but focused solo strings, harps and antique cymbals.

"Toy-boxes are really towns in which the toys live like people" wrote Andre Helle who, in 1913, devised the scenario for La boite a joujoux (adding "or perhaps towns are just boxes in which people live like toys"). But Debussy made no attempt at meaningful symbolism; "something to amuse the children—nothing more" he said. In giving life to the wooden figures, and with its prominent role for piano, inevitably one's thoughts turn to Petrushka, far more dramatically effective, but hardly a children's story—well, not a child of 1913 anyway. Tilson Thomas is more artful than Torteher on Chandos: in the first tableau his doll dances her waltz with more look-at-me' allure and grace—Tortelier's rubato is comparatively (perhaps aptly) mechanical—and, after Punch has biffed the little soldier on the nose, an angrier captain pops his head out of the box. On the debit side, a wooden doll surely wouldn't pray as quietly as does the LSO clarinet in the following tableau after the battle (track 4, 4'45": the marking is only piano); the distant shepherd's piping in the third tableau is not really distant at all, and the flutes are too loud at the moment of embrace between the soldier and the doll at the end of the scene. Whilst I'm grumbling, Sony's notes don't include a synopsis—as entertainment, this music, unlike Jeux, is dependent on knowledge of the stage action (Chandos supply a detailed scenario). If forced to make a choice between the two, it would be Tilson Thomas; his is the more polished, confident and stylish account.

Perhaps Debussy was attracted to the idea of a children's ballet in 1913 to cleanse himself from the sins of Nijinsky's staging of his Prelude and Jeux (May 1912 and 1913 respectively). While enthusiastically welcoming Simon Rattle's Jeux (EMI), CH noted that the music's free-born invention was "sacrificed a little in favour of a richer romanticism". It could be argued, too, that Haitink (Philips) achieves his unrivalled clarity and delicacy at the expense of a degree of passion. I happen to feel that both, more successfully than Tilson Thomas, and in their quite different ways, achieve a special fantasy, and that contrejour lighting which Debussy was aiming at in his orchestration to oversimplify, it's a question of ensuring equal prominence for the woodwind. The LSO strings are unsteady in their opening four-bar chord (unusually played here as two plus two), but there's a line of accumulating energy from the main theme at fig. 51 (12'29") through to the climax at fig. 71 (16'23") which is less easy to feel in Rattle's and Haitink's accounts. With a slightly faster basic tempo this Jeux bears out Tilson Thomas's judgement, as he himself put it in GRAMOPHONE in February 1991, in knowing "what to hold on to and what to throw away".

-- Gramophone [11/1992]

This coupling offers two youthful concerto works and a solo interlude. The most substantial work is the Britten Piano Concerto (placed last on the disc), written in 1938 when the composer was 25. It is a boisterous piece, unstintingly virtuosic and with clear overtones of Prokofiev. It suits Douglas well, and he tackles the relentless passagework with spirited enthusiasm. His tone is rather hard, particularly in the fortes, but this is not entirely unsuitable given the steely, driven quality of the music. The first-movement cadenza is genuinely exciting, and the point when the orchestra re-enters in a moment of calm retreat (track 7 at 9'21''), with Douglas providing a rare beauty of tone and colour in the following lyrical passage, is beguiling... The Debussy Fantaisie (1890), which despite the composer’s efforts remained unperformed during his lifetime, receives a strong performance with crystalline clarity in the passagework... His playing breathes with natural phrasing and articulation, and has a sure-footed integrity...

-- Tim Parry, Gramophone [10/1997]

The Halle and Sir Mark Elder follow their previous highly acclaimed DeBussy albums, with a stunning orchestral collection including a world premiere recording. This collection features works from across the composer's career, from his early winning of the Prix de Rome, as a result of which he composed the delicate cantata La Demoiselle elue in 1887. Recorded following the highly acclaimed Proms performance and featuring stand-out soloists Anna Stephany and Sophie Bevan, hailed by reviewers. The enigmatic Nocturnes date from 1897-9 and show the composer at the height of his orchestral powers, in music that is highly evocative of mood and which displays deft instrumental writing. Mastery of instrumental writing is further evidenced in the technically demanding Premiere Rhapsodie, which calls upon the full range of emotions from the soloist; here the Halle's Principal Clarinet, Sergio Castello Lopez. The album features a world premiere recording of Colin Matthew's orchestration of the piano piece Les soirs illumines par l'ardeur du charbon, unknown until it's discovery in 2001. This arrangement follows Matthews' universally acclaimed orchestrations of the DeBussy Preludes.

English translation by Hugh MacDonald.

"...The casting shows the depth of ENO 30 years ago, with Eilene Hannan as Mélisande, more knowing, less naive than some portrayals, the baritone Robert Dean a Pelléas with just the right mix of muscularity and lyric grace, Neil Howlett the conflicted Golaud and John Tomlinson the pontificating Arkel." - Andrew Clements, The Guardian U.K.

In celebration of Claude Debussy's Centenary in 2018, the French pianist Vincent Larderet presents a recording of three masterpieces: Images (Book I), Préludes (Book II), and the world premiere recording of André Caplet's transcription of the Symphonic Fragments from Le Martyre de saint Sébastien, revised and completed by Vincent Larderet. Following three highly acclaimed recordings that won 23 awards worldwide and were nominated for the prestigious ICMA Award, ARS Produktion presents an 80-minute album by a pianist whose interpretations have been compared to legends of the piano such as Michelangeli, Arrau and Zimerman and who was praised for his "astonishing range of pianistic colours" (PIANO News, Germany). Mr. Larderet is the Artistic Director of the Piano au Musee Wurth international festival in France, and in 2014 was appointed "Honorable International Artist-In-Residence" of the Hong Kong Music and Performing School.

DEBUSSY 12 Etudes. Estampes. Deux Arabesques. L’Isle Joyeuse • Mariangela Vacatello (pn) • BRILLIANT 94371 (76:40)


Every so often—perhaps inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’s eponymous poem—I contemplate things that might have been, and quite frequently my contemplations involve music: What would Beethoven’s 10th have sounded like? How much richer would we be today had Brahms not destroyed his early string quartets out of mortal fear of being called an epigone? Would the world be a different place had Dinu Lipatti been able to carry out his wish to record The Well-Tempered Clavier ? One of the reasons I find these questions so fascinating is because we can neither know their answer nor can we rely on what we do know to hypothesize it—after all, Beethoven’s Ninth is strikingly different from his Eighth; Brahms’s lost string quartets are forever gone; and Lipatti never got around to record a single prelude and fugue by Bach. Before hearing this new recording featuring the young pianist Mariangela Vacatello, it had never dawned on me that Debussy’s late piano works—his set of 12 Etudes for piano—present the perfect Borgesian riddle: Would Debussy have abandoned the Impressionist idiom had he lived another few years, or would we be speaking of Debussy’s Impressionism merely as a phase that eventually yielded to a new musical language?


You may be wondering how my musings about where Debussy’s music may have ended up had the composer not succumbed to cancer at age 56 relate to the task at hand. Well, I respectfully submit that they are relevant here because what I enjoyed the most about Vacatello’s recording is how exquisitely and unapologetically she conveys the striking novelty of these masterpieces. Like Mitsuko Uchida in her classic Philips recording, Vacatello does not unduly look for Impressionism in the etudes, nor does she try to tame these visionary and occasionally wild scores. She does not over-pedal, she does not soft-pedal, she does not play legato when Debussy calls for non-legato, and she does not seek to create tonal haze when the score does not call for such effects. Instead, Vacatello presents these works for what they are­—experiments with a fascinating musical language Debussy had not yet fully figured out.


In the early works, Vacatello is equally compelling. Like her compatriots Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, Aldo Ciccolini, and Maurizio Pollini, Vacatello subscribes to the Italian tradition of playing Debussy, which is characterized by rhythmic precision, a stronger emphasis on primary colors, and a certain degree of level-headedness. While it is true that Vacatello’s Debussy does not soar or intoxicate like that of Samson François, I find that it is just as fascinating. I am particularly impressed with L’Isle Joyeuse , in which Vacatello (unlike many pianists who play this piece) refuses the temptation to sectionalize—and, I believe, trivialize—in favor of a cohesive narrative that slowly builds towards apotheosis. The engineering is outstanding. This recording comes with my highest recommendation. Vacatello is definitely a pianist to watch.


FANFARE: Radu A. Lelutiu

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

On this disc, Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune – possibly Claude Debussy’s most popular work for orchestra – is framed by two of his greatest achievements in the medium, La Mer and Images pour orchestre. All three works are programmatic, but Debussy’s concern was to create an atmosphere rather than any naturalistic likeness. The Prélude is a case in point – while taking his inspiration from a pastoral poem by Stéphane Mallarmé, Debussy famously told a conductor who wanted a more detailed explanation: ‘It’s a shepherd playing the flute, sitting on his bum in the grass!’ In La Mer, Debussy abstains from the various clichés of so many other musical depictions of water, and instead creates an immediately recognizable seascape, largely through a pioneering use of various instrumental timbres, once described as ‘an impressionism of sounding dots’. Soon after La Mer, the composer started on Images, in which he went even further: although using a large orchestra, Debussy mainly avoids big sonorities, concentrating instead on unusual sound combinations and on transparency. His aim was compose a cycle focusing on the colours of three countries, while as far as possible avoiding the clichés associated with their music. Of its three panels, the expansive middle one, Ibéria, is often performed as an independent piece, but its Spanish colouring takes on new shades when framed by Scottish mists and the freshness of spring in France. The present disc combines new recordings by Singapore Symphony Orchestra and Lan Shui with the team’s acclaimed performance of La Mer, first released in 2007 on Seascapes, a programme of sea-related works. The reviewer in American Record Guide called it ‘the most astounding, effective, and beautiful recording of La Mer I have ever heard’ and in BBC Music Magazine it was described as ‘an unequivocally world-class performance’.

The orchestrations are colorful, subtle and brilliant. A joy to hear. Equally delightful is the playing. The Lyon National Orchestra under Jun Märkl captures the subtlety and beauty of tone throughout every piece and the recorded sound is really first rate.

The Debussy Orchestral Works, Vol. 6 from Naxos offers a nice mix of familiar and rare works, all in exquisite orchestrations by musicians who either knew Debussy or admire his works. Debussy himself wrote all of this music for the piano 4 hands. The orchestrations are colorful, subtle and brilliant. A joy to hear. Equally delightful is the playing. The Lyon National Orchestra under Jun Märkl captures the subtlety and beauty of tone throughout every piece and the recorded sound is really first rate. Orchestrating piano music requires an understanding of both keyboard and orchestral techniques in order to rethink the piano music for an ensemble. It requires interpolations that are natural to the spirit of the music without imparting on the orchestra a pianistic left and right hand. These arrangements make the music sound as if it has always been for orchestra.

The selections range from pops concert favorite, Clair de lune, in a luminous classic arrangement by Andre Caplet to Debussy's early Symphony, of which he completed only the first movement, orchestrated by Tony Finno. With Clair de lune we also get the entire Suite bergamasque from which it comes, the other movements colorfully arranged by Gustave Cloez. The total effect of the suite in this orchestral form is much like a ballet score, performed with lyric grace by Lyon musicians. This is a particularly fine and sensitive performance of Clair de lune. This heartstrings pulling performance of moves at a slightly faster pace than some of the others but remains quite lovely within its own world in the suite.

The Symphony is actually rather good. Its swaggering main theme is a bit repetitious but the overall style is much more romantic than impressionist and reminiscent of perhaps d'Indy, Faure or the rarely heard symphony by Dukas. I've heard one other chamber ensemble arrangement of Debussy's sketches and this version for full orchestra by Tony Finno is far and away the best.

Henri Busser's arrangement of the Petite suite, which certainly has much orchestral competition with performances recorded by Martinon, Tortelier, Ansermet, Dutoit and many more is aided here by superb sound quality and excellent, sensitive artistry. Busser's other orchestration is Printemps, a two movement piece with one foot in the late-romantic era and the other feeling around in the new musical impressionism. The music is played with shimmering beauty. Probably the clearest and most sparkling recorded performance of Printemps I've heard.

En blanc et noir, orchestrated by Robin Holloway is not just black and white as the piano key title implies, but quite colorful. The arrangement was commissioned in 2002 by the San Francisco Symphony. The music is more boisterous and exuberant,sounding at times as if it is about to turn toward Debussy's Iberia but with the Spanish atmosphere replaced instead by a somewhat mischievous quality which grows on you with repeated hearings. The last movement Debussy dedicated to "mon ami Strawinsky"‘. With performances that treat the older works as if they were newly discovered and the unknown works with a sense of magic and wonder, this album is definitely a winner.

- Greg La Traille, ArkivMusic.com

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The most compelling item in this collection is En blanc et noir, not only one of Debussy's most advanced instrumental works (composed for two pianos), but the orchestral arrangement sounds closest to the composer himself. Robin Holloway drew upon Debussy's contemporaneous Jeux as a model, with numerous passages in the first and third movements replicating that work's uniquely colorful sound world. In the reflective middle movement Holloway's orchestral dress evokes the dreamy atmosphere of Les parfums de la nuit from Iberia. Jun Märkl and the Orchestre National de Lyon offer a sparking performance, playing the music with real verve, as if they had discovered a heretofore unknown Debussy masterpiece.

Debussy only completed one movement of his proposed Symphony in B minor (1880), and then only as a piano duet. Tony Finno's orchestral arrangement emphasizes the music's Russian influences (it was composed around the time he was employed by Tchaikovsky's patron Nadezhda von Meck), though there are occasional pre-echoes of the mature Debussy. Märkl and his band perform this and the remainder of the program (the familiar Suite bergamasque, Petite Suite, and Printemps arrangements) with the same vitality and commitment afforded En blanc et noir. The spacious recording is a bit over-reverberant, but nevertheless provides solid presence and impact. Debussy fans will find this release a real delight.

--Victor Carr Jr, ClassicsToday.com

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Other review quotes:

"Subtle and sensitive readings" - Gramophone.

"This is bewitching music-making that should on no account be missed. One of the finest discs Naxos has ever released." - Classic FM (about Volume 1 (8.570759).

"Volume 6 in Naxos’s popular series presents five highly diverse works in gorgeous orchestrations by Debussy’s colleagues or later admirers. Indeed, pieces such as Clair de lune and Printemps may even be better known in these seductive guises than in their original forms. Of particular interest is Debussy’s sole attempt at composing a symphony, a youthful work imbued with the spirit of French Romanticism, only the first movement of which he completed." - Naxos