Debussy

Soprano Natalie Dessay leaves the dizzy heights of Bellini’s Amina, Donizetti’s Marie and Massenet’s Manon to inhabit the more discreet emotional and vocal world of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande with a cast of fellow francophones.
“There’s more to life than top notes,” Natalie Dessay has said. She has, of course, made her reputation with the florid, stratospheric heroines of Romantic French and Italian opera, but in this new DVD from Vienna she portrays a heroine who presents few opportunities for vocal display, but many for subtle characterisation – Debussy’s Mélisande. Dessay had sung the role just once before, in concert in Edinburgh in 2005. Pelléas et Mélisande is full of ambiguity and its vocal lines closely reflect Maurice Maeterlink’s often enigmatic text. A few unaccompanied, ballad-like phrases are the closest Mélisande gets to an aria.

Since he became the music director and conductor of the San Francisco Symphony, Michael Tilson Thomas has largely focused his attention on presenting the symphonies of Gustav Mahler in splendid audiophile recordings, for which he has received critical and popular praise. So his first hybrid SACD of works by Claude Debussy comes as a surprise, not only because the sound world is quite different from Mahler's, but Tilson Thomas' interest in Debussy has seemed less obsessive over the years.

Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt has devoted many creative energies to Bach, and it shows in this reading of Debussy favorites (and a few less common works): Hewitt's is a rather precise and tempo-consistent Debussy, light on the atmospherics but with technical agility to spare. What you'll think of this may well depend on how you see the nature of Debussy's break with the French Romantic tradition: did it involve a dryness of expression, or is the usual hazy vision the right one?

Saskia Giorgini presents Images, containing some of Claude Debussy's most colourful piano works. Starting with tuneful early works such as the Danse (Tarantelle styrienne) and Deux arabesques, Giorgini gradually works towards later, more ambitious pieces such as the Estampes and the two sets of Images, from which the album derives it's name. Debussy's music has always held an enormous attraction to Giorgini, and this album is the result of a years-long search to bring these mesmerising musical pictures to life. With her solo Liszt recordings, Giorgini has demonstrated a masterful touche and unique sense of colour, which makes Debussy's music an obvious next step.

A great program featuring the largely neglected piano concertos from some famous composers active in France between 1890 and 1951. Debussy's "Fantaisie" was created in a period of change, exploring how the piano could become a voice in the orchestra.

Nocturnes, L 98 (also known as Trois Nocturnes or Three Nocturnes) is an Impressionist orchestral composition in three movements by the French composer Claude Debussy, who wrote it between 1892 and 1899. It is based on poems from Poèmes anciens et romanesques (Henri de Régnier, 1890).

Debussy - La Mer - Trois Nocturnes - LSO - Previn (EMI)
EAC 099pb4 Rip | APE+CUE, LOGs | 48:24 min | 192 MB 300 dpi PDF Complete Scans
Genre: Classical - 20th Century| Label: EMI Classics

I do not recall having heard Previn conduct Debussy before, and his recording of the Images four or five years ago was not especially well received as a performance (HMV ASD3804, 12/79; CD EMI CDC7 47001-2, 2/84). Like Davis's though, but in a totally different way, they have the ability to make one think about these much-recorded works afresh. I suppose I had thought that the centre of Debussy's orchestra in both pieces is the woodwind and high strings, until Davis's bracing readings, of La mer especially, revealed how much of both the light and the weight of that music can be seen to be conveyed by the brass. Where Davis's Nocturnes are mistily northern and his La mer is the Baltic, Previn moves the music much closer to the Mediterranean with his warm and passionate, never histrionic but perhaps Latin concentration on the strings. MEO (Michael Oliver) Gramophone

Debussy, Achille-Claude / Jean-Efflam Bavouzet - Complete Piano Works Vol.3 & Vol.4 (2008)
Post-Romantic | 2CDs | FLAC | NO LOG | NO CUE | Easy CD-DA(vol3) EAC(vol4)| 479 Mb| Complete Booklets(fr.eng.de) | CHANDOS | RS

It sure have taken a long time but here they are ! Enjoy…
Bavouzet’s previous two volumes have been very well received both critically and commercially. In a recent review of volume two the LA Times wrote, ‘In what may turn out to be the greatest complete recorded survey of the composer’s piano music yet, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet… plays with such bracing clarity that hearing the early Romantic pieces, one feels like jumping into an icy pond after an hour in the sauna’. Of the same volume International Record Review has noted, ‘I had the highest praise for Jean-Efflam Bavouzet’s first volume of Debussy, and the present disc is fully the equal of that one in terms of colour, refinement of touch, spontaneity and technical finish…

'This is the fourth and final disc in Jean-Efflam Bavouzet’s Debussy series for Chandos, and perhaps the most impressive… Bavouzet’s performances manage to reconcile perfectly those echoes of the earlier sensuous writing with the newly invented, harder-edged sonorities. He is just as convincing in the two sets on Images as well, whether perfectly gilding the swoops and swirls of Poissons d’Or, or evoking the stately monumentality of Hommage à Rameau.'
The Guardian

Some tracks on Disc 4 were messy & had a too long filename, so I re-ripped the entire album with EAC.