Claude Debussy-PIANO MUSIC (Connoisseur Society 1967)

Today's date allows for a post of solo piano music by four different composers, with music spanning over seventy years.

The modern piano owes much to the sonic and pianistic endeavors of the composer whose death supplies the jumping-off point for the music to follow: Claude Debussy, who died in 1918.
Debussy's exposure to the music of an Indonesian Gamelan Orchestra at the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition was to have an important effect on his writing, and to further influence the music of many of the French composers to come- Including Olivier Messiaen, and subsequently his pupil, Pierre Boulez.

Each of the composers featured here has used the piano in a distinctly personal way.

























Claude Debussy died on this day in 1918, aged 55 years.

From the cover notes (enclosed) by Nat Hentoff:

(...) I remember wondering at the term "impressionism" applied to this music, the music of Debussy. The term did not seem to me to convey the precision, the accuracy of the scenes,sounds and sometimes almost even smalls within the mysterious settings.And then, later, I read a letter he had written: "What I am trying to do is something different- an effect of reality, but what some fools call impressionism, a term that is utterly misapplied especially by the critics who don't hesitate to apply it to Turner, the greatest creator of mysterious effects in the whole world of art". In a way, it can be said of Debussy what was written of Marianne Moore- that he was "a literalist of the imagination."

As for the piano music, which has seemed to me both more precise and more mysterious than his work in any other area, he urged that his interpreters imagine the piano as being without hammers. If that were done, and if the piano were to be transformed into into an instrument that could evoke real toads in imaginary gardens what was needed was an exceptional knowledge of the piano. Required. Edward Lockspeiser pointed out in his book: Debussy was "the closest analysis of touch and vibration of keyboard harmony and figuration, of the immeasurable contrasts in tone and register- in short...an analysis of all the technical resources of an instrument whose very limitations and defects were to be turned by Debussy into newly discovered virtues".

Side One:

a1-Feux D'Artifice
a2-La Cathedrale engloutie
a3-Les Collines D'Anacapri
a4-Les Sons et les Parfumes Tournant Dans L'Air du Soir
a5-La Terrasse des Audiences du Clair de Lune

Side Two:

"Children's Corner" Suite:
b1-Doctor Gradus Ad Parnassum
b2-Jimbo's Lullabye
b3-Serenad for the Doll
b4-Snow Is Dancing
b5-The Little Shepherd
b6-Golliwog's Cake-Walk

b7-Clair De Lune

Ivan Moravec-Piano























(1)