The centenary of Debussy’s death provides an opportunity to (re)discover some hidden treasures from the Arcana catalogue, which have been unavailable for many years. Debussy’s...

The centenary of Debussy’s death provides an opportunity to (re)discover some hidden treasures from the Arcana catalogue, which have been unavailable for many years. Debussy’s piano works make up a vast corpus of such outstanding quality that it can rightly be considered to be the most important produced in the last century. He completely renewed the art of piano playing; at the same time, he gave a decisive new direction to the very idea of structure in music. Both these aspects are found in the works here played by Stany David Lasry on two restored Érard pianos, covering the period from the works of his youth to the two great sets of Préludes, which constitute a veritable compendium of twentieth-century piano writing. The French pianist also appears in the recording of mélodies featuring bass-baritone Thierry Félix, which includes Debussy’s last sixteen songs (all those composed after he completed Pelléas et Mélisande) preceded by Mandoline and four songs composed in his early maturity.