Debussy: Pièce pour l'oeuvre du ‘Vêtement du blessé'

The first volume of the complete recording of Debussy's piano works by Michael Korstick has been compared favorably with those of the legendary Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli. The second volume presents Book Two of the Preludes coupled with the rarely performed and recorded "La boite a Joujoux", better known in Debussy's orchestral version of this work.

Claude Debussy was an excellent pianist, and Marguerite Long, who worked with him, admired “the suppleness, caress and depth of his touch”, as well as his “full, intense sonority, free of any harshness in the attack, like Chopin”. After the elegant, delicate Arabesques of 1888, in 1901 Debussy published his first important piano work, Pour le piano, in the tradition of the great baroque keyboard masters whom he so admired; it was to his dear daughter Chouchou, born in 1905, that he dedicated the six simple miniatures of Children’s Corner, a blend of emotion, playfulness and humour. “When one can’t afford to travel, one must make do with the imagination,” he said, commenting on the Estampes, whose heady sonorities and magical evocations refer to the Orient, Spain, and the spirit of France; Debussy was also capable of irony, as in La Plus que lente, composed in 1910 as “café music”. Less well-known, the Pièce pour le Vêtement du blessé was composed for a charity during the First World War devoted to dressing the wounds of soldiers. Marguerite Long described L’Isle joyeuse (1904) as an exuberant, “joyful gust of wind” and “a celebration of rhythm”; it is also a superb exploration of tone-colour and nuance.

To kick off Fuga Libera’s Debussy year, Jan Michiels has conceived a superb and generous programme to honour the "ultima verba" for piano which Debussy composed during the First World War, and the most significant fragments of the collective tribute rendered to him by some of the masters he had influenced in La Revue musicale of 1920. Apposing his own signature to the cd booklet, Jan Michiels invites us to listen to his wonderful Erard grand piano.

His selection does full justice to the quality of these works which, though less popular than the Préludes and some of the composer’s earlier works, lack nothing in terms of inspiration and insight into the future. The interpolation in the Études – rendered here in full – of the pages by Dukas, Bartók, Roussel, de Falla and Stravinski and the scattered pages signed "Claude Debussy, French composer" between 1914 and 1917, are here particularly compelling: what better tribute could we give this composer on the dawn of the 150th anniversary of his birth?

2012 marks the 150th anniversary of Claude Debussy's birth. On this occasion, Universal Classics is proud to re-release, on the Decca label, the complete piano works recorded by Philippe Cassard between 1989 and 1993. The four volumes of which this cycle consists are now being brought together for the first time as an attractive box set at an equally attractive price, with the addition of two pieces unpublished at the time of the initial recording and recorded in June 2011: 'Les soirs illuminés par l'ardeur du charbon' and 'Pour le Vêtement du blessé'.

Behind the intense sensual beauty of Debussy’s scores was the keen intellect of a determining force in 20th century music. Drawing on diverse musical influences and eclectic literary and pictorial sources, his genius shaped a distinctive style, expressed in a meticulously detailed language.

In his iridescent orchestral works, his vivid and innovative piano music, and his haunting chamber pieces, Debussy, who towards the end of his life signed himself ‘musicien français’, opened up a new musical world.

A Decca Classics unlimited edition, including Jean-Yves Thibaudet’s acclaimed recordings of the solo piano music, as well as Alfons and Aloys Kontarsky’s Deutsche Grammophon recordings of the works for two pianos and for piano duet.