LA Terrasse Des Audiences

From the opening notes of “Brouillards,” it’s clear why Alexander Melnikov has chosen one of his own historic pianos for Debussy’s second volume of Préludes. His French Erard piano, from around 1885, possesses a chiming bass, a delicate yet resonant upper register, and a warm middle. It’s ideal for music that so often requires a fine brushstroke. Melnikov obliges, playing with exquisite restraint, control, and voicing as he whisks us to sun-drenched, humid India, the world of illustrator Arthur Rackham’s fairies and to a firework display, full of brilliant, nervous tension. Melnikov is joined by Olga Pashchenko for a thrilling performance of Debussy’s arrangement for four hands of his orchestral suite La Mer.

Alexander Melnikov is among those pianists increasingly committed to playing the works of the past on the instruments from which they came into being (or could have done so). Thus, it is on an Érard - a ''period'' piano - that he performs the second book of Debussy's Préludes, and with the help of Olga Pashchenko, the composer's extraordinary transcription of La Mer.

French pianist Monique Haas recorded the piano works of Debussy and Ravel twice, once in the late '50s and early '60s for Deutsche Grammophon and again in the late '60s and early '70s for Erato. The later recordings are released here in this six disc set from Warner Classics. As on the earlier set, Haas' performances are elegantly stylish, technically impeccable, consummately musical, and quintessentially French. Pick any piece by either composer at random, and you'll see. Try her bright but sensual Suite Bergamasque with its ravishing Clair de lune or her brilliant and visionary Études with their astounding concluding Pour les accords. Or try her recklessly virtuosic Gaspard de la nuit with its frightening Scarbo or her sweetly swaying Valses nobles et sentimentales with its heartrending Épilogue. There are only two meaningful differences between Haas' recordings: in the earlier performance, she is more passionate and impetuous while in the later performances she is more measured and thoughtful.

Debussy is closer to the expressionism of Schoenberg than to the chiselled sonorities of a Chopin or the extravagant virtuosity of a Liszt, even if his refined art can still be seen in the line of tradition of 19th-century music. This is frequently forgotten in the interpretation as well as the assessment of his oeuvre. Debussy himself decried the concept of musical impressionism because he feared, rightly, that superficial refinement would degenerate into musical mist, concealing the subtleties of a new musical idiom and its structural logic. Thus, for example, instead of heading his 24 “Préludes” in two books with programmatic titles in his autograph score, he appended them at the bottom of the individual pieces.