Regular duet and two-piano partners Hélène Mercier and Louis Lortie have returned to the studio for this all-Debussy program. The album features duets written by the composer himself -such as the Petite Suite, the Six Épigraphes antiques and the Marche écossaise sur un thème Populaire; as well as a number of arrangements of his solo piano pieces (the Première Arabesque, La Fille aux cheveux de lin and the "Slavic" Ballade). The album ends with André Caplet’s monumental arrangement of Debussy’s best known orchestral work, La Mer. Stripped of its orchestration, this two-piano version allows the listener to more easily appreciate Debussy’s ground-breaking harmonic innovation. The album was recorded in the concert hall at Snape Maltings in Suffolk, using a pair of Bösendorfer 280 VC grand pianos.

REVIEWS:

Regular duet and two-piano partners Hélène Mercier and Louis Lortie present this all-Debussy program, starting and ending on the water. The duo characterize Debussy’s impressionism well with playing that is sensitive and charming.

The album ends with André Caplet’s monumental arrangement of Debussy’s best known orchestral work, La Mer. Stripped of its orchestration, this two-piano version allows the listener to more easily appreciate Debussy’s ground-breaking harmonic innovation.

-- Cumbria Times (Andrew Palmer)

The playing by the two distinguished pianists is faultless, distinctly outlining the notes with a clarity of separation; the recording in the superb acoustic of the Snape Maltings captures the sound ideally; the presentation of the booklet, with extensive and informative notes in three languages by Roger Nichols, is excellent; and the music itself, I need hardly add, is marvelous.

Most frustratingly then, is that Debussy’s masterpiece for the two-piano repertoire, his late En blanc et noir, is missing. That, however, is not to say that the purchaser of this very full disc is under-compensated. Nevertheless, there might be something to be said for letting us hear Debussy’s music in two-piano and piano-duet arrangements, especially those published during his lifetime, even when we may suspect that reasons of commercial necessity may have prompted their original issue.

-- MusicWeb International

Harpists Eva Tebbe and Ekaterina Levental remark that Debussy makes the invisible visible and turns the unspeakable into a musical world full of mysticism, layers of ambiguity and evocative meanings. A century after his death, he is being celebrated across the world in 2018, and this album promises to make a special contribution on record with arrangements of works, most of them relatively unfamiliar, which particularly lend themselves to the ethereal and exquisite combination of voice and harps. Much of the music here was written while Debussy was composing his only opera Pelléas et Mélisande, a Symbolist drama based on the play by Maurice Maeterlinck, who recognized that in many ways Debussy had not only set his play to music but even outstripped and further enriched his original. There is the early and peaceful Ballade from 1890, then the Proses lyriques from 1892-3 and the seductive Trois Chansons de Bilitis (1897), from which this musical partnership takes its name. Bilitis is the fictional poet of Classical antiquity invented by Pierre Louÿs, writing in an erotic, symbolist vein after the fashion of Sappho: and when in 1900 Debussy came to use the texts of Louÿs again for the Musique de Scène pour les chansons de Bilitis, the music accompanied a tableau vivant in pre-Raphaelite style of winsome and scantily clothed young women. The recital is completed by the Danse sacrée et danse profane – originally composed for harp and orchestra in 1904, here with the orchestral parts arranged for a second harp – and the six Epigraphes Antiques from 1914, which return to the musical material of the Bilitis works but in the composer’s more allusive late style which would lead to his final masterpiece written for Serge Diaghilev, Jeux.

The developmental stages of the clarinet are marked by repeated interest in improving the instrument at crucial stages in its history, definitively accomplished in an ‘accelerated’ manner during the course of the 19th century thanks to daring projects that led to an extraordinary evolution. Consequently, interest in writing aimed at probing the peculiarities of the instrument was accentuated, with French composers' attention directed towards exploring the thousands of new expressive and technical possibilities, creating a catalogue of great interest demostrating both the instrumentalists’ mastery as well as musical effects to dazzle listeners. The pieces selected for this album clearly echo that production, originating in the shadow of the Parisian conservatoire and intended to test the potential of young performers while probing the musical languages of the time, whose aesthetics were as varied as eve. Coquard's Melodie et Scherzetto, from 1904, sprang from the pen as an examination piece, a score in which technical and expressive aspects converge with a highly captivating melodic writing. In Claude Debussy's Petite pièce, the varied dynamics, combined with the near ‘improvisational’ flow of the rhythmic-melodic material, make the piece fascinating and pleasant to listen to. As is Rabaud's Solo de Concours Op.10, with its surprising texture entrusted to the clarinet right from the start in the form of a solo of considerable complexity. Messager's own Solo de Concours is rich in captivating chromaticism riven by diatonic segments. Paul Pierné's score, on the other hand, is an exercise in style, blending ‘rhetorical’ images and ‘French-style’ speculations. His cousin Gabriel’s Canzonetta of 1888 brings forth a sampler of melodies, giving rise to a path of great lyricism. The use of such sonorous imagery is in common with that of Paul Jeanjean, whose Arabesques is imbued with seductive designs aimed at enhancing the potential of the instrument, on which he was an acclaimed virtuoso. Cahuzac belongs to this category, as well, and with his Cantilène he dwells in the soundscapes of his southern France, irradiating it with a Mediterranean luminosity. Cultural belonging is a peculiar characteristic of composers living in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, as Semler-Collery demonstrates when he pilots his Rêverie et scherzo through the turbulence of early-20th-century French style. Honegger's choice for his Sonatine has a completely different origin. With its mysterious beginning founded on skillful chromaticism with vague oriental echoes, the subsequent Lent et soutenu reveals a greater rigour in that same sound path, entrusted to the woodwind, austere and mysterious. It is with the Vif et rythmique that the “restlessness” is laid to rest in order to rely on “improvisational” sonorities that wink at agile and impertinent jazz gestures.

When Debussy completes the score, based on the eponymous symbolist play by Maurice Maeterlinck, of Pelleas et Melisande in 1902, the world of opera still abides by Richard Wagner and the upheaval he caused with Tristan und Isolde. But Debussy decides to stand on the exact opposite side, and uses his new opus to preach a new aesthetic creed. In depicting the forbidden love story between the timid Pelleas and the beautiful Melisande, kept apart by an unfortunate marriage, the French composer brings us back to the immortal legend of Tristan and Isolde, but this time showing the world that the future of music could very well lie far away from Wagner’s overwhelming lyricism and outsized rhetoric. This new production, created by one of the rising stars of French stage direction Benjamin Lazar for the Malmö Opera (headed by Ingmar Bergman from 1952 to 1958), encapsulates all the different aspects of this mysterious work, from the oniric poetry invented by Maeterlinck and Debussy to the realism, poignant because openly simple and even mundane, of these profoundly human beings lost in a forest full of sound and symbols that will never let them escape. The young French conductor Maxime Pascal, the Orchestra of the Malmö Opera, and an almost all-French cast (among which the excellent Marc Mauillon and Jenny Daviet), bring forth with intelligence all the refinement and all the vitality this unique and fascinating score has to offer.

This release launches an important new APR series devoted to the French Piano School. For around 150 years France has nurtured a distinctive style of pianism centered on the teaching of the Paris Conservatoire. The heyday of the school was probably the first fifty years of the 20th century and this series of recordings aims to explore in depth the often-forgotten recordings made at this time. Marius-François Gaillard was the first pianist to perform the complete piano works of Debussy in concert, which he did first in 1920, and again in 1922. He subsequently made the recordings featured here, and these were by far the largest body of Debussy piano recordings until the 1930s. As such they give us the closest view of Debussy playing to the composer’s own time and reveal a clarity and objectivity which exemplifies the traditions of French pianism but is somewhat different from the ‘impressionist’ style of Gieseking which was to follow and become the accepted model. Gaillard later pursued a career as a composer and his early recordings were forgotten. To commemorate the 100th anniversary year of Debussy’s death, this is their first reissue. Carmen Guilbert also had a short active career, but as a pupil of Marguerite Long her playing, particularly of Fauré, is important. These are her complete classical recordings.

Soprano Janet Perry hails from Minneapolis, Minnesota. She began her career with lessons on piano and violin at a young age. In her adulthood she has found resounding success, having recorded several major works under Karajan’s baton, including Mozart’s C Minor Mass, Beethoven’s 9th symphony, and Bruckner’s Te Deum. Perry writes of the works chosen, “...classical music has truly made me who I am today. It has been a constant companion since my earliest childhood... The songs of Mozart Debussy, Faure, Duparc, and Strauss have been in my repertoire for a long time, we are old friends who enjoy music-and the silence between the notes, together.” Perry is accompanied by pianist Jean Lemaire, who specializes in accompaniment and chamber music. He frequently performs throughout Europe, the USA, Japan, and South America.