★★★★★
Touching performance ... Tamsin Waley-Cohen. It's their year of composition, 1917, that links the four works for violin and piano in Tamsin Waley-Cohen and Huw Watkins' collection, all by composers who had either not been affected by the rise of modernism in the previous decade at all, or in Debussy's case, who had played a crucial part in it but had taken his own music in a different direction of its own...
- www.theguardian.com
2014-06-13
★★★★★
'Textures carefully weighted, phrasing perfectly polished' ... Hiroko Sasaki. Photograph: Hiroyuki Ito/Getty Images Debussy's two books of Preludes have been recorded on pianos of the composer's own era before - Alexei Lubimov used a 1913 Steinway and a 1925 Bechstein for his ECM set. But Hiroko Sasaki has gone back a couple of generations further to an immaculately restored Pleyel instrument from 1873, which she discovered in a New York piano showroom...
- www.theguardian.com
2014-05-30
★★★★★
Buy it from Buy the CDDebussy: Pelleas Et Melisande [Jacques Imbrailo, Michaela Selinger, Vincent Le Texier] [Arthaus: 108086] [Blu-ray] [2013] [NTSC]Arthaus, Blu-ray2013 "A theatre of fear and cruelty that ends in a murderous climax," is how Nikolaus Lehnhoff describes Pelléas et Mélisande...
- www.theguardian.com
2013-11-29
★★★★★
Debussy's manuscripts are at one with his passion for Japanese art: the notes are small, delicate, perfectly placed, a whole page shaped and controlled with exquisite taste. In such a world, nuance plays a vital role. In the first book of Images, Nelson Goerner responds infallibly to the composer's demands...
- www.classical-music.com
2013-10-30
★★★★★
'Just about anyone with more than a passing interest in Debussy's music will have a twofold reason for wanting to hear this disc. First, it has the first recording of the recently found Première Suite d'Orchestre. Lasting almost half an hour, it exists in complete form as a two piano version, while three of four movements were orchestrated by Debussy...
- www.classical-music.com
2013-10-10
★★★★★
François-Xavier Roth's recordings with Les Siècles have already included a period-instrument performance of Stravinsky's complete Firebird and, at next month's Proms in London, conductor and orchestra will join forces again for what promises to be one of the most revealing of this year's centenary performances of The Rite of Spring, using the French-made instruments that would have been played at the premiere...
- www.guardian.co.uk
2013-06-28
★★★★★
Angela Hewitt's collection includes most of Debussy's significant works for solo piano other than the books of Images, Studies and, of course, the Preludes. There's not a trace of the "impressionistic" about her treatment of any of them: this is Debussy portrayed in clean, bright colours and sharply focused detail, with every rhythm precisely etched. At times it can even seem a bit too brisk and business-like...
- www.guardian.co.uk
2012-10-08
★★★★★
Buy it from Buy the CDClaude Debussy24 PréludesRoyal Scottish National Orchestra/ Jun MärklNaxos2012 Sails flap idly on calm seas, cool breezes dance across plains, snow lies thick on the ground - we are in the poetic landscape of Debussy's delicate Préludes for piano, orchestrated with a vibrant paintbox by Slovak composer, conductor and arranger Peter Breiner...
- www.guardian.co.uk
2012-09-24
★★★★★
Buy it from Buy the CDDownload as MP3Debussy: Préludes Books 1 & 2Pierre-Laurent AimardDecca (UMO)2012 Pierre-Laurent Aimard's much-publicised recent claim in an interview with a German newspaper that Debussy is a greater composer than Wagner is by no means original - it was also made in an influential study of 20th-century music first published in France in the 1960s...
- www.guardian.co.uk
2012-09-04
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