Claude Debussy: Préludes

CD 1

Préludes premier livre
Danseuses de Delphes
Voiles
Le vent dans la plaine
"Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir"
Les collines d'Anacapri
Des pas sur la neige
Ce qu'a vu le vent d'ouest
La fille aux cheveux de lin
La sérénade interrompue
La cathédrale engloutie
La danse de Puck
Minstrels

Alexei Lubimov Bechstein (1925)

Trois Nocturnes
Transcription pour 2 pianos 4 mains par Maurice Ravel
Nuages
Fêtes
Sirènes

Alexei Lubimov Steinway (1913)
Alexei Zuev Bechstein (1925)

CD 2

Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune
Transcription pour deux pianos par Claude Debussy

Alexei Lubimov Bechstein (1925)
Alexei Zuev Steinway (1913)

Préludes deuxième livre
Brouillards
Feuilles mortes
La puerta del vino
Les fées sont d'exquises danseuses
Bruyères
General Lavine - excentric
La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune
Ondine
Hommage à S. Pickwick Esq. P.P.M.P.C.
Canope
Les tierces alternées
Feux d'artifice

Alexei Lubimov Steinway (1913)

Recorded April 2011

ECM New Series 2241_42

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. Perhaps, even though their popularity makes it almost impossible, we ought simply to forget about the titles when playing or listening to these pieces and recall something else that Debussy once said: “Music is a free art gushing forth, an open-air art boundless as the elements, the wind, the sky, the sea.” It is in this manner – sans rigeur, as Debussy repeatedly marked his music – that Alexei Lubimov plays the “Préludes”. The recording also contains the “Trois Nocturnes” in Maurice Ravel’s two-piano transcription as well as a two-piano arrangement of Debussy’s seminal orchestral masterpiece, the “Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune”.