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.

Founded in 2003, the Daroch Trio is a family affair, made up of three siblings: Anna Daroch (violin), Maria Daroch (piano), and Tomasz Daroch (cello). Their debut in their native city of Łódź, Poland met with high critical acclaim, inspiring them to continue along their artistic path. They are all graduates of the Henryk Wieniawski Music School in Łodź. Their new Dux CD finds the trio playing three important and challenging piano trios well-established in the chamber repertoire, by Dvořák, Debussy and Ravel.

The Warsaw Philharmonic lives up to a program that expects much from it's sophisticated performance techniques, resulting in a great performance. Conductor Noriaki Kitamura writes: "The sound has a sense of transparency, and the detailed ensemble work is superb. The Faun dream drifting within the silence is beautiful, just like an impressionist painting. The force and freshness of the sound, which is inspired by Hokusai prints, reflects the expressions of the real sea itself. Pomp and envy in the Viennese court is recounted in "La Valse." The "Coppelia," one of the classic songs of French ballet, features Polish mazurkas rendered by a true Polish orchestra. The music making by Kitamura and the Warsaw Philharmonic is solid, without any kind of deception. It can be used as a reference for evaluation of acoustics."

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.

Providing a platform for young artists has always been important to the label Ars produktion, next to helping them lay the groundwork for a music career. The young flutist Sofia de Salis, who enjoyed tuition among the most distinguished teachers and has already won numerous competitions, will certainly continue to achieve great success in the future.

"This is a convenient recital, presenting—unusually, it turns out, in a single program—the clarinet-and-piano works of Debussy and his contemporary Florent Schmitt, plus those of the demi-Six Honegger, Milhaud, and Poulenc (the other three were Auric, Durey, and Tailleferre), who were more or less a generation younger. Despite a name that sounds as German as, say, “John Barbirolli,” clarinetist Ralph Manno is a native German, making the program all the more atypical. This disc follows soon after Oehms’s release of a two-CD set featuring Manno and Alfredo Perl in music of Brahms; both that and the present disc, however, turn out to be reissues of 1995 recordings.

Manno’s performance of Debussy’s Rhapsodie (there never was a deuxième) is languorous at first, then fluid and dynamic as the music demands. His sound, appropriately international rather than characteristically German, is attractive and well focused, and his technique and control are impressive. The aptly named Petite pièce, written as a sight-reading exercise, is smooth and expressive.

The Lorraine-born Florent Schmitt (1870–1958) should be better known; he is remembered today mostly for the extravagant, almost expressionistic La Tragédie de Salomé. The present Andantino, by contrast, is brief, modest, and perhaps even a bit sentimental...

If the composers who made up Les Six had any musical trait in common (and Milhaud, for one, denied that they did), it is a quintessentially French irreverence, even impudence. (Two of the movements of Milhaud’s sonatine are marked Très rude.) The Honegger and Milhaud sonatines were both composed in the 1920s; the former is an aphoristic work in three movements lasting only six minutes all together; Manno plays with impressive command here... The late, folksy Duo Concertant is an attractive example of Milhaud’s Provençal style; the slight Caprice, running under two minutes, serves as a sort of encore...this disc can be recommended for its overview of the core French clarinet recital repertoire."

FANFARE: Richard A. Kaplan

Perhaps the most characteristic feature of the 20th-century musical landscape is the stylistic pluralism, visible not only across numerous schools and movements, but also in the language of individual artists who, unrestricted by the prevailing composition rules, would reach for various means of musical expression. The most crucial issues addressed by post-Romantic composers included the sound colour, important both for pre-war impressionists and representatives of sonorism. The album presents pieces from the beginning of the 20th century, performed by an international group of musicians related to the Belgian performance school, in which the play on the sound colour takes place in the chamber space. The leading pair of instruments are flute and viola - a couple which perfectly complements each other; its sound inspired a number of composers, like Debussy, Huybrechts, Roussel, and Schulhoff.

The “Wanderer Fantasy” is the theoretical starting point and crowning work of this recording, which, however, also thoughtfully looks at the atmospherically light side of Romantic wandering. The program thus firmly leads from the famous wanderer of the educated classes, Felix Mendelssohn, and his journey through Scotland to colorful musical atmospheric images by composers from Liszt to Debussy. They tell of forests, the world of gnomes and sprites, and of fantastical and exotic dances. Venetian gondola songs then segue from dry land onto the water and guide us on the winding bends of the 'Grand Canal' all the way to the 'L’Isle joyeuse', that island of joy regarded as the kingdom of love and bliss. Concerts in Germany and abroad have always earned the young German pianist Jamina Gerl excellent reviews from professional critics. For instance, the press in New York declared her orchestral debut performance of Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto “a triumph for all concerned,” christening Gerl “a lioness of the keyboard.” In addition to her versatile concert programs, she is often praised for her poetically inspired piano playing, remarkable virtuosity and richly shaded, differentiated expression. Concerts and numerous competition triumphs resulted in her appearing in such prestigious venues as Carnegie Hall and the Steinway Hall in New York, the Beethoven Haus Chamber Music Hall, the Illsley Ball Nordstrom Recital Hall, Mannes College Concert Hall, Tonhalle Dusseldorf and Munetsugu Hall Nagoya.

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’.

To launch their exciting new partnership Robin Ticciati and the DSO present Debussy’s La mer, Fauré’s Pelléas et Mélisande and the premiere recording of composer Brett Dean’s arrangements of Debussy’s Ariettes oubliées featuring Magdalena KoženA. Following his DSO debut Ticciati chose La mer to perform when he returned as the newly announced Principal Conductor in 2016. Ticciati has conducted La mer and Pelléas et Mélisande across Europe with the LPO, Concertgebouw Orchestra and the Budapest Festival Orchestra receiving excellent reviews. Brett Dean’s orchestration of the Ariettes premiered in Sydney in 2015 and at once displayed Debussy’s music in a new light. Dean’s new arrangements expand on the colours heard in Debussy’s original six songs applying unbelievably delicate orchestration that sounds like gossamer; The Daily Telegraph declared it ‘a revelation’. The all-French programme also includes the prelude to Fauré’s opera Pénélope and his orchestral suite Pelléas et Mélisande in a perfectly judged recording which augurs well for this exciting new partnership.

Towards the end of the 19th century, France saw a renaissance for chamber music, perpetuated not by popular demand but by the composers themselves. An early response to Saint-Saëns' initiative came from a former student, Gabriel Fauré, who completed his Violin Sonata in A Major and gave it the opus number 13, making it the first instrumental work in his official work list.