Velut Luna / via Boccaccio 31 (PD) / II 2007 / Piano:Elisa Marzorati / Claude Debussy - Préludes / CVLD 152 / 24bit/96kHz original recording made at Studio Zanta (Steinway&Sons D274 Concert Grand), Camponogara, Italy, on August 2006 using the latest standard of digital technology based upon Prism Sound AD2 analog-to-digital converter.
| Track 01. Danseuses de Delphes | |
| Track 02. Voiles | |
| Track 03. Le vent dans la plaine | |
| Track 04. Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir | |
| Track 05. Les collines d’Anacapri | |
| Track 06. Des pas sur la neige | |
| Track 07. Ce qu’a vu le vent d’Ouest | |
| Track 08. La fille aux cheveux de lin | |
| Track 09. La sérénade interrompue | |
| Track 10. La cathédrale engloutie | |
| Track 11. La danse de Puck | |
| Track 12. Minstrels | |
| Track 13. Brouillards | |
| Track 14. Feuilles mortes | |
| Track 15. La puerta del vino | |
| Track 16. “Les Fées sont d’exquises danseuses” | |
| Track 17. Bruyères | |
| Track 18. Général Lavine – eccentric | |
| Track 19. La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune | |
| Track 20. Ondine | |
| Track 21. Hommage à S. Pickwick Esq. P.P.M.P.C. | |
| Track 22. Canope | |
| Track 23. Les tierces alternées | |
| Track 24. Feux d’artifice |
FIRST BOOK
Great music for the piano has been written by the great composers, but
few of them have been able to make the piano’s percussive mechanism
yield a poetry of its own. Debussy did so quite consciously by exploiting
the very defects of the piano: he approached the modern concert grand
as an instrument of illusion. Like Chopin, Debussy considered the function
of the sustaining pedal to be a “sort of breathing”. Although
notes on the piano could not be properly sustained, great music could
be made using the contrast of registers. A new and imaginative style
of piano writing was thus created by Debussy which is illustrated in
many varied aspects in the Twenty-four intimate pieces forming the two
books of Preludes, written between 1910 and 1913.
I. Danseuses de Delphes
This prelude which opens the first book was inspired by the sight of
three sculptured bacchantes on the frieze of a Greek pillar in the Louvre.
An affecting grace and dignity emerge from slow moving chords.
II. Voiles
Almost the entire piece is built on the whole-tone scale. The title
can be translated as either sails or veils, but the former meaning is
more usually accepted; indeed the floating thirds and fourths anchored
to a pedal point evoke the vision of sailing-boats in some southern
harbour.
III. Le Vent dans la plaine
The sensation of the racing wind is caught in a delicate arpeggio figure,
abruptly snapped by dancing chords. The piece finally disappears into
thin air.
IV. Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir
The inspiration of the fourth prelude is a line of Baudelaire from the
poem Harmonie du soir, which had earlier been set to music by Debussy
as a song. Clotted harmonies and chromatic effects are made to convey
the musical counterpart of the poet’s sensuous languor.
V. Les collines d’Anacapri
Presents a brightly coloured medley. A hint of cowbells, or of donkeys
picking their way up the mountain slopes of the island, fragments of
a folk-tune and of a tarantella – all these are jostled together
into a gay musical kaleidoscope.
VI. Des pas sur la neige
Is another sketch drawn from nature, with a slow, stumbling rhythm of
footsteps marked out in the desolate expanse of an ice-bound snowscape.
VII. Ce qu’a vu le vent d’Ouest
One of the most powerful of Debussy’s piano works, portrays a
howling hurricane. Here there is no longer the dreamy texture of so
many of the preludes: in this piece Debussy presents an explosive violence
almost recalling the manner of Berlioz.
VIII. La fille aux cheveux de lin
The subject of the well-known prelude is a poem by Leconte de Lisle,
one of the four Chansons écossaises by this poet; written in
praise of imaginary Scottish beauties. Debussy had earlier set this
poem as a song.
IX. La sérénade interrompue
After Scotland, an exotic vision of Spain is evoked in this next prelude
with its thrumming guitar effects and its shadow of a shy and cautious
serenade.
X. La Cathédrale engloutie
Illustrates the old Breton legend of the cathedral of Ys that was said
to rise out of the sea off the ancient western province of Amoricaine.
The thematic material of Debussy’s prelude partly derives from
plain-chant and mediaeval Harmony, and the sombre music marvellously
conveys impressions of swelling waves and sunken bells.
XI. La Danse de Puck
Debussy had been attracted to several plays by Shakespeare. The mocking
character of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is here sketched out in
the most whimsical of moods, full, so it seems, of unpredictable tricks
and made magically to disappear at the close of the piece into the depths
of the forest.
XII. Minstrels
Humour of a broader kind prompted the quaint idea of the last prelude
of the first set. One is not definitely sure of the inspiration of this
amusing sketch. Debussy was a great lover of the circus and he may well
have had clowns or acrobats in mind. But Minstrels, so many commentators
have held, is more likely to be inspired by the vogue of the American
Cake-walk.
SECOND BOOK
One of the great explorers of music, Debussy went on experimenting with
his visionary art to the last. The second book of preludes, published
in 1913, five years before his death, shows the composer reaching out
to many strange new regions. Debussy’s novel harmony becomes bolder
– there are examples of bi-tonality and even poly-tonality –
and in place of the veiled effects in his earlier works he is not afraid
of resorting to harsh dissonance. As in the first book of preludes,
there is the appeal of exotic and mythological subjects and a sense
of musical caricature.
I. Brouillards
The first prelude of the second book leads straight into an almost impenetrable
Impressionistic fog. Glimmers of diffused light pass through the pages
of this shadowy music – Monet or Whistler might have been the
inspiration, or more likely the composer’s recollections of his
own London visits – until the mysterious reiteration of two chords
reduces the musical vision to silence.
II. Feuilles mortes
Autumnal landscapes frequently drew from Debussy his more poignant expressions
of melancholy, and the indulgent fin de siécle despair is nowhere
more authentically expressed than here with the sight of fluttering
leaves in the otherwise motionless scene.
III. La puerta del vino
The title of this prelude derives from a postcard sent to Debussy by
Manuel de Falla of the famous gate of Alhambra. De Falla himself was
the first to declare that this music, intended to be played “with
contrasts of extreme violence and passionate sweetness”, was unmistakably
Spanish in its voluptuous character – and this despite the fact
that Debussy had never travelled in Spain. A Habanera rhythm persists
throughout the piece in the form of a basso continuo.
IV. “Les Fées sont d’exquises danseuses”
Displays a diaphanous manner of writing for the piano belonging in style
to the ballet Jeux which Debussy wrote for Diaghilev at about the same
period. Trills and filigree arpeggios keep the nervous texture constantly
alive, while the fleeting agility of the dancers is reflected in sudden
and capricious changes of tempo.
V. Bruyères
This is obviously a counterpart in the second book to La fille aux cheveux
de lin in the first. There is again a Hebridean turn to the curves of
the seemingly improvised melody.
VI. Général Lavine – eccentric
The contemporary folk music of the United States appears in the form
of a Cake-walk in this prelude. What prompted the composer’s fantasy
here was a marionette figure impersonating an eccentric general, with
a skip in his gait, a fixed grimace and a puppet walk.
VII. La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune
The next piece moves abruptly from the music hall to the moonlight.
The title of this prelude was a phrase which occurred in an account
published in the Paris newspaper Le Temps of the 1912 Indian Durbar
(the ceremony of the coronation of King George V as Emperor of India).
VIII. Ondine
Similar effects of tracery pervade Ondine: a water-nymph who later was
more dramatically though not more sensitively illustrated in a work
of this title by Ravel.
IX. Hommage à S. Pickwick, P.P.M.P.C.
Is a ponderous allusion to the British national anthem: either the caricature
of a cartoon or the cartoon of a caricature. Here again there is no
mistaking the broad humour.
X. Canope
Two ancient funeral urns from Canopus inspire the meditative reverie
of this prelude.
XI. Les tierces alternées
Is the only piece in the two books not suggested by literary or pictorial
associations and amounts to a virtuoso study based entirely on alternating
thirds.
XII. Feux d’Artifice
Adapts a Lisztian sense of virtuosity to a dazzling illustration of
a firework display. It is a full-fledged rhapsody rather than a prelude,
concluding as the last gigantic rocket has shot itself off in the form
of a glissando over the whole length of the keyboard, with some kind
of gruesome echo of the Marseillaise.