Debussy: Préludes - Book 1: No. 3, Le vent dans la plaine

"Son should have no trouble building a career. She's got the fingers and the personality." DALLAS MORNING NEWS

Debussy's twenty-four Preludes, like Chopin's, are surprisingly self-sufficient. Divided into two books, published in 1910 and 1913, the Preludes are an intimate record of Debussy's inner and imaginative life. Their titles were after-thoughts rather than direct inspirations, largely because Debussy's delicate and complex response to natural phenomena or human idiosyncrasy could hardly be contained or expressed by a simple caption or heading.

The Cuban-American pianist Jorge Bolet isn't readily associated with the music of Debussy, but his selection of sixteen of the composer's Preludes yield performances of refinement and fluidity. Lines are clearly delineated and the myriad of impressions within a single piece are nothing short of kaleidoscopic.

Jorge Bolet made this superbly languid and delicate recording of 16 Préludes by Debussy less than two years before his untimely death in 1990 at the age of 75. The Cuban-born pianist's reputation was largely founded on his mercurial, blockbusting performances and recordings of Rachmaninov and Liszt, but this disc shows a true pianist’s lightness of touch, as well as some superbly sensitive engineering and technical preparation of his beloved Baldwin SD-10 instrument, chosen by Bolet in preference to the far more popular Steinways.

Bolet's own personal fastidiousness – he always recorded in a jacket and tie – is reflected, and in perhaps unexpected and certainly fascinating ways, in this personal selection from the two books of twelve Préludes, and the ordering of them. He may have been a reluctant, and and indeed until the last couple of decades of his life, infrequent visitor to the studio – he once remarked that he would rather give hundreds of concerts than make one recording – but this wariness does not translate itself into metronomical stiffness but rather reflect a refined version of the spontaneity that manifested itself more naturally in his concert playing.

‘Bolet’s performances, with their inimitable beauty of line and shimmering sonority (very much the product of an unobtrusive but subtle virtuoso pedal technique), their poetic freedom within a basic pulse, were like some serene and final distillation of all he had learnt and known, the massive and legendary virtuosity of earlier days directed into an everincreasing concern with more durable musical truths.’ Gramophone, 1991

This disc in the Welte-Mignon player piano series, features Debussy and Ravel playing all their 1912 interpretations. Works include Debussy’s Children’s Corner Suite and Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales.

“Rarely have I heard the hostility of the sea evoked as eerily as in [Mark Elder’s] polished account of Debussy’s La Mer”. The Observer, on the Halle’s Prom July ’06.