Debussy

Jean-Efflam Bavouzet here presents his second volume of Debussy’s Complete Works for Piano, which reveals a more reflective, private period in Debussy’s compositional career. Debussy won the Prix de Rome in 1884 at the age of twenty-one and through it tasted institutional life for the first and last time. It was one of the most miserable periods in his life. Quite aside from having to leave his Parisian mistress, Debussy was never comfortable …..

This Pierian CD, advertised in the May 2012 Naxos catalog as an “also available” disc, is the label’s first issue from 2000 featuring the complete recordings of Debussy as pianist. All of his records were made in two sessions, a series of four short 78-rpm sides with soprano Mary Garden (his first Mélisande) at the Paris G&T studio in 1904 and 14 Welte-Mignon piano rolls recorded on November 11, 1913. Both are famous groups of recordings, restored and reissued over the decades, but this release is the best I’ve ever heard them.

The four saxophonists of the Quatuor Zahir set the scene for this second recording, which brings together the emblematic composers of twentieth-century France and their masterpieces. Ravel's Pavane pour une infante défunte and Trois Chansons, Nadia Boulanger's Trois Pièces, Poulenc's Chemins de l'amour, Charles d'Orléans's Trois Chansons, Debussy's Petite Suite and Rêverie all take on the warm timbres of their instruments in these arrangements for saxophone quartet, revealing new colours. They are echoed by two premières, Graciane Finzi's Petite Suite and Fabien Waksman's Les Lunes galantes, conceived as a fifth movement to Debussy's Petite Suite. Here the Quatuor Zahir is reaffirming its commitment to creation, its virtuosity too, but above all the singularity of its unique musical identity.

The listener may be forgiven for not knowing that any Debussy "Edgar Allan Poe Operas" existed, for neither of the works recorded here was ever completed. Moreover, and you don't learn this unless you read the notes or have investigated for yourself, one of them was hardly begun. After the success of Pelléas et Mélisande in New York, Debussy was encouraged to adapt a pair of Poe's short stories for a new American production. Debussy needed little encouragement and quickly produced a pair of scenarios, but other projects intervened, and the operas were never finished. The more complete one is La chute de la maison Usher (The Fall of the House of Usher), for which there are substantial sketches and several full realizations including the one here by "creative musicologist" Robert Orledge.

Since the first performance of Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien on May 22nd, 1911, there has been much speculation about the reasons which could have led Debussy to compose incidental music for the play of Gabriele d'Annunzio and about the validity and authenticity of the musical work. Granted, the circumstances in which the piece was created are grounds for suspicion.

If anybody is, then Zoltán Kocsis is truly a musical artist in the Renaissance sense: he explores ever greater areas of his profession, and takes possession of new realms. Initially, we looked on with incomprehension, asking why as a pianist of genius, he did not devote himself exclusively to his instrument. Why was he dissipating his creative energies is so many fields: teaching, conducting, writing essays, creating concert programs, forming societies and building an orchestra – and of course, there was his composition as well. But these days, we really have to acknowledge that with Kocsis, this is not some sporting achievement, but utilising the Wagnerian term – a kind of “Gesamtkunstwerk” activity.

Jose Iturbi’s father built and tuned pianos as a hobby so the young José had access to an instrument from a very early age. He was one of four children and his sister Amparo (1899–1969) also had a career as a pianist. At the age of eleven Iturbi was studying piano at the Valencia Conservatory with Joaquín Malats, a friend of Albéniz. The Spanish composer heard Iturbi and gave him part of his new work Iberia to play. When Iturbi was fifteen, the people of his home-town collected money to send him to study at the Paris Conservatoire with Victor Staub. He obtained a premier prix in 1913 and after World War I received a professorship at the Geneva Conservatory. During the 1920s he led the life of a touring virtuoso, travelling across Europe, Africa, the Middle East, the Far East, Russia and South America.

Two of Britain’s leading exponents of French song, the acclaimed sopranos Lorna Anderson and Lisa Milne, join Malcolm Martineau for the second volume of Hyperion’s overview of Debussy’s haunting, mercurial songs. The French composer’s output in this genre extended throughout his life and he was always inspired by poetry—from his first adolescent attempts to set Paul Verlaine’s Fêtes galantes (which he later revised) to the Trois Poèmes de Mallarmé, written five years before his death. All inhabit a universe of shifting colours and impressions, from the sensual, perfumed ‘flutes and flesh’ of the Chansons de Bilitis to the Proses lyriques, which foreshadow the dreamlike atmosphere of Pelléas et Mélisande.