The main works here are, of course, the Images and Jeux, and I suspect it will perhaps be above all for that latter masterpiece, one that is difficult to balance and shape into the necessary dazzling whole, that many collectors already possessing other versions will wish to invest in this new issue from Simon Rattle and his City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.
Let me say straight away that this is a fine account of Debussy's elusive ballet score. Timbres are beautifully delineated and balanced, and detail is splendidly clear whenever it is thematically, rhythmically or colouristically significant but with the right degree of haze when it isn't—as the late Sir Lennox Berkeley once told me, the composer surely didn't want clinical clarity in the performance of his music. Above all this, the structure of this piece, founded as it is on a single motif of three adjacent notes comes through with firmness. One slight reservation is that at times I looked for a more youthfully impetuous and ingenuous quality in the playing: even if we choose to forget the original dance scenario, there is an intensely spontaneous aspect to this music. But if this is sacrificed a little in favour of a richer romanticism, that too is most persuasive, and more so (I feel) than Martinon's more overtly dramatic reading on EMI. The only other thing that I query is that the magical bursting into lyrical bloom after fig. 64 of the score (here at the 16'00'' point) seems treated more as a point on the way to a bigger climax, and that the double-dotted rhythm of its theme is evened out towards single dots as indeed it is also with Martinon. But these points aside, this is an account of Jeux that is not to be missed.
The Images are also most beautifully done, with a deeply poignant ''Gigues'' and a lambent ''Rondes de printemps'' framing a superbly vivid and atmospheric ''Iberia'' as the centrepiece of the triptych. Though by comparison with the other works, the King Lear music is just a couple of scraps from Debussy's workshop it is worth hearing and nicely presented with tie all-important brass especially convincing, better than Martinon's, which—however authentically French—sound harsh to my ears. The Martinon performances of all three of these works are compelling and at mid price, but the 1974 recordings have quite a lot of hiss and do not enjoy the remarkably fine digital sound and wide dynamic range that EMI have given Rattle.'