For Claude Debussy, the imaginative life was real life. A musical pantheist and revolutionary, he sensed the very heart of the centre of natural phenomena, their ‘inscape’ or essence; and seeking, as he put it, to ‘express the inexpressible’, he longed to liberate music ‘from the barren traditions that stifle it’. Such fantasy and freedom combine with a no less marked love of precision and finesse to give Debussy’s music an inimitable calibre and stature.
Few overviews of Debussy’s piano music have been as consistently satisfying as Gordon Fergus-Thompson’s. Sensitively recorded, it is full of half-lights, colour and vibrancy. It won the MRA ‘Best Instrumental Recording of the Year’ and a Penguin Guide ‘rosette’ and has received rave reviews in the international press.
CLAUDE DEBUSSY
CD 1
Rêverie
Suite bergamasque
Images oubliées
Pour le piano – Suite
Images – Set I
Images – Set II
CD 2
Deux Arabesques
Danse bohémienne
Ballade slave (1890)
Danse (Tarantelle styrienne)
Valse romantique
Mazurka
Nocturne
Préludes – Book I
CD 3
L’isle joyeuse
Estampes
D’un cahier d’esquisses
Morceau de concours
Masques
Préludes – Book II
CD 4
Children’s Corner
Hommage à Joseph Haydn
Le petit Nègre
La plus que lente
Berceuse héroïque
Elégie
Page d’album (Pièce pour le vêtement du blesse) (1915)
Douze Études
Gordon Fergus-Thompson, piano
Recording Producer: Alexander Waugh
Recording Engineer: Martin Haskell
Recording Location: Henry Wood Hall, London, UK, July 1989
‘the most consistent in quality among modern editions … The pianist’s robust, colourful sonority and sensitive phrasing perfectly suit this alluring, atmospheric repertoire’ Classics Today
‘Fergus-Thompson’s range of tone colour, and control of dynamic and texture are nothing short of transcendental’ (Préludes) Julian Haylock, CD Review