Debussy's complete piano works
Debussy's complete works for piano
Préludes, Books 1 & 2. Pour le piano. Estampes. Images, Sets 1 & 2. Children’s Corner. Etudes. D’un cahier d’esquisses. Rêverie. Valse romantique. Masques. L’isle joyeuse. La plus que lente. Le petit nègre. Berceuse héroïque. Hommage à Haydn. Danse bohémienne. Mazurka. Deux Arabesques. Nocturne. Tarantelle styrienne. Ballade. Suite bergamasque. Fantaisie
Walter Gieseking (pf) Hessian Radio Orchestra, Frankfurt / Kurt Schröder
EMI mono 565855-2 (4h 36‘ · ADD) Recorded 1951-55 Buy from Amazon
Gieseking’s insight and iridescence in Debussy are so compelling and hypnotic that they prompt either a book or a blank page – an unsatisfactory state where criticism is concerned! First and foremost, there’s Gieseking’s sonority, one of such delicacy and variety that it can complement Debussy’s witty and ironic desire to write music ‘for an instrument without hammers’, for a pantheistic art sufficiently suggestive to evoke and transcend the play of the elements themselves (‘the wind, the sky, the sea…’). Lack of meticulousness seems a small price to pay for such an elemental uproar in ‘Ce qu’a vu le vent d’Ouest’, and Puck’s elfin pulse and chatter (pp aérian) are caught with an uncanny deftness and precision. The final Debussian magic may not lie in a literal observance of the score, in the unfailing dotting and crossing of every objective and picturesque instruction, yet it’s the start or foundation of a great performance.
More domestically, no one has ever captured the sense in Children’s Corner of a lost and enchanted land, of childhood re-experienced through adult tears and laughter, as Gieseking does here. ‘Pour les tierces’, from the Etudes, may get off to a shaky start but, again, in Debussy’s final masterpiece, Gieseking’s artistry tugs at and haunts the imagination. Try ‘Pour les sonorités opposées’, the expressive centre of the Etudes, and you may well wonder when you’ve heard playing more subtly gauged or articulated, or the sort of interaction with a composer’s spirit that can make modern alternatives seem so parsimonious by comparison. So here’s that peerless palette of colour and texture, of a light and shade used with a nonchalant but precise expertise to illuminate every facet of Debussy’s imagination.
An added bonus, a 1951 performance of the Fantaisie for piano and orchestra, completes an incomparable set of discs. The transfers are a real triumph.
