George Xiaoyun Fu brings an evocative range of instrumental timbre to Debussy

When I was a student I attended a master class with the late Menahem Pressler, who spoke throughout the class about colour and touch. At the end, when he was fielding questions from the audience, a man at the back asked Pressler why he bothered talking about colour in the first place. ‘It’s all an illusion,’ this man claimed, ‘as, unlike any wind or string instrument, the piano cannot sustain or crescendo after any single note is struck.’

We were all struck dumb by this. I might obviously be biased since I am a pianist, but I’d retort that the piano is an instrument that can bring forth a smorgasbord of colours, timbres and shadings. During my following years of study I worked hard in defining and differentiating many different sorts of touches and sounds on the piano, following in the footsteps of many composers who had mastered the intricacies of writing for this beloved box of strings and hammers. I learned that my pianistic colour palette was not limited by the instrument as much as it was by the boundaries of my own imagination.

Many years later I am now releasing my second recording, ‘Colouring Book’, which is an album all about colour, play and creativity. The album’s central work is the complete set of Claude Debussy’s 12 Études. Debussy is a composer already known for his sense of sonic colour, but this set is a late masterpiece that, along with his two books of Préludes, can be seen as the pinnacle of his piano output. Often the implied instrumentation practically jumps off the page: one hears the buzzing of reeds, the faraway cry of a horn, the soft murmurings of a harp, the shimmering of a string section, even the clanging of Indonesian gamelan …

How does Debussy achieve these sonic miracles? For a start, he is a very specific and fussy composer. He asks us to search for every sound imaginable by manipulating every mode at our disposal: harmonies, pedalings, timings, articulations, dynamics, voicings, etc. And what is colour in music but the perception of sonic difference?

Articulations of notes and phrases, for example, are painstakingly differentiated. On just the first page of the first Étude, ‘Pour les cinq doigts’, a pianist is faced with four different types of articulations for an recurrent interrupting figure: dot, tenuto dash, tenuto dash with dot, and marcato wedge combined with either a dot or a tenuto dash. Elsewhere contrapuntal textures are balanced in unconventional hand positions to facilitate the voicing of certain lines. Small hairpins open and close over the tiniest of phrases, suggesting very subtle surges and retreats: the pianist is constantly tasked with fussing over those small-scale eddies without disturbing the larger overarching gesture. In that vein, rubatos are also incessantly fussed over: in the first climax of ‘Pour les tierces’, pianists are instructed twice to ‘rubato, accel., rit.’ all within a span of four beats.

I could go on. In short, there’s a lot of information to synthesise and, unlike many of the finger-busting études by the 19th-century virtuosos, the technical challenges are but one of many interlocking pieces that must fit together neatly in order to demystify each study. Debussy poses puzzles that stimulate the hands, heart and intellect equally – a formidable challenge indeed. But for these reasons this wonderful collection has also been one of the most gratifying works for me to study, perform and record.

I’ve bookended the two halves of Debussy’s set of études around some other pieces with a similar study-type outlook. In 2013 I commissioned Matthew Aucoin to write his Three Études as a modern iteration of the étude genre: as the composer writes, ‘These are studies not of particular technical challenges of piano playing, but rather in forms of musical motion and pianistic sonic possibilities.’ Similarly, in Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade’s Three Études for Piano and Flower Pots, nine flower pots are tuned to a scale by adding water (F–F sharp–A–A sharp–B–C–C sharp–C three-quarter sharp (microtone)–F sharp) and are then played with percussion mallets. Both Ninfea’s and Matthew’s works are extensions of the étude genre as imagined originally by Chopin and Debussy – a small work that focuses intensively on one single element, be it technical or musical, and endeavours to tease out all possible expressive capabilities of that element.

The last modern work on the album is my own piece, Passacaglia on a Theme by Radiohead. My favourite album throughout university was Radiohead’s ‘OK Computer’, which I would listen to on repeat for hours on end; whenever I heard the opening riff of ‘Airbag’, it was like returning to the beginning of another cycle.

I examined this bass-line from every angle. It was built on two groups of three notes (F–C–B and C sharp–A–E), which hinted at an alternating A major/minor seesaw permeating the whole song. Borrowing the explorational outlook of Debussy’s Études, I teased out a variety of permutations and variations over this simple bass-line. I found myself writing a tarantella-like dance, a rhapsodic build-up of trills and ornaments, a suave Sarabande, and finally a virtuosic cadenza that covers both extremes of the keyboard; eventually it became an eight-and-a-half-minute soloistic showpiece of sorts.

Throughout the album I’ve tried to bring a sense of play and humour. When pianists think of studies, often the first thing that comes to mind are the drab finger exercises upon which we were forced to cut our teeth. Debussy turns this idea on its head from his very first Étude, transforming Czerny’s flavourless five-finger pattern into a humorous jig at the drop of a hat. It’s a lesson in ingenuity: to start with one element and seek out all the possibilities with a dash of creativity and good humour, and to avoid being bogged down in a mentality of limitations.

Which brings me back to the impudent question of the man in the master class audience, still lingering like a stench in my memory. In response to him Pressler started: ‘You might say that, but …’ as he trailed off he turned to the piano and began playing the opening phrase of Chopin’s First Concerto. Instantly the temperature in the room changed as magic coruscated out of the piano. A gentle, repeated E minor chord in his left hand supported the singing, legato melody in his right hand, which he kept afloat with such grace and feeling. His velvety pedaling breathed resonance into the harmonies without leaving the faintest trace of mud.

It was an astonishing feat. But then at the end of the first phrase he abruptly stopped; the resulting silence left us all afraid to breathe. Now turning back to the man, he finished: ‘How would you have such thoughts in your mind when your ears can tell you otherwise?’ 

George Xiaoyuan Fu’s album ‘Colouring Book’, featuring Debussy’s Études alongside other works, is available digitally from Platoon 

This feature originally appeared in the SUMMER 2025 issue of International Piano – Subscribe Today