Cutting across their timeworn densities, Lubimov lets those block chords sing with ecumenical clarity and hits that fated low note with perfect pressure. Nowhere do these two ends of the spectrum mesh so democratically than in the “La cathédrale engloutie,” which drips from Lubimov’s fingers like the anointing perfume from Mary Magdalene’s alabaster jar. Between them is nothing so dramatic as to bog down the listener’s response, so that even the most provocative spirals-viz: “Le vent dans la plaine,” “Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest,” and the flamenco-inspired “La sérénade interrompue”-seem but compressions of the more typified mysteries of “Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir” and the echoing passage of “Des pas sur la neige.” Even the sportive “Les collines d’Anacapri,” while exuberant enough, only reinforces the reflective heart of this music. This decision brings about surprising color shifts and, somehow, a keener feel for the rhythms therein.īook I, composed between 19, opens and closes with touches of cabaret, balancing the sweep of Debussy’s pastoral vision with “pingbacks” of striking modernism.
With such knowledge held firmly in mind, Russian pianist Alexei Lubimov roulettes the sonority of these emotionally charged miniatures by recording Book I on a 1925 Bechstein and Book II on a 1913 Steinway-the logic being that such instruments might better express Debussy’s own envisioning of how they should be played. On the latter note, it’s easy to see why Debussy’s sound has so often been misconstrued as “impressionistic,” when in fact it was more closely aligned to the assured stroke of a pen than to the fleeting contact of a paintbrush. Whether by the descriptive titles famously appended to the ends individual pieces or by the fact that Debussy never intended for them to be played as a unified set, one can see that the Préludes were built as agents of a creative mind for whom fragments were worlds unto themselves. For while their collective title conjures the well-tempered catalogs of composers as divergent as Bach, Chopin, and Shostakovich, in practice they bear little resemblance to those 24-part pantheons of keyboard literature. Though unconventional in form, the two books of piano music known as Claude Debussy’s Préludes have withstood the test of time by means of their structural integrity and ordering-or, in the latter case, their lack thereof. Recorded April 2011, Sint-Pieterskerk, Leut, Belgium