Debussy: Estampes, L.100 (Perianes, Goerner)

Two drop-dead awesome recordings of Debussy’s famous triptych, with the first on some days taking its place as my favourite Debussy recording of all time. Perianes takes the work at a slower tempo than you’ll usually find, and there’s a general anti-virtuoso character to his playing. But the colour, melodic shaping and obscenely fine dynamic tiering he generates is so much more than worth the tempo tradeoff. In Pagodes, I don’t think any other recording has managed to make the sections at 0:41 and 1:20 sound completely improvised; and in Jardins a whole bunch of overlooked textures are caught – the alternate-bar bass accents starting from 13:42, or the differentiation between the semiquavers and the grace notes at mm.148/150 (14:43). Goerner’s recording has a brighter hue than Perianes – quicker, the fast runs more sharply etched, a little more generous with primary colours and a little less insistent on pastel shades. Where Perianes is sphinxlike in La soirée, Goerner has heady exultancy, and if Perianes’ Jardin opens with a fine mist of water, Goerner opens with a mechanically precise, insistent patter of rainfall, building rapidly into a full-size rainstorm (with superb articulation throughout: see 28:12 for a perfect demonstration of how to pull off a non-legato-quick-semiquaver-against-staccato+tenuto-quaver-planing-chord texture.)

Pagodes (Pagodas) – A surprisingly effective imitation of gamelan music (2:16 and similar), especially since that gamelan tuning is really very different from Western systems. Written in ABA-Coda form (sections beginning at mm.1, 32, 53, 78). Debussy asks for the first theme to be played “almost without nuance”, suggesting an image of a pagoda frozen in a painting (the set’s called “Prints, so) or in a distant mist. The A section is knit together, essentially, from a mixture of pentatonic scales and a rising G#-C#-D# motif (sometimes expanded [m.11, 0:41], sometimes reduced to a C#/D# oscillation [m.15, 0:54], sometimes deployed polyphonically [m.23, 1:20], sometimes augmented [m.37, 2:04]). The LH melody which enters at m.7 (0:27) is especially clever: it not only reinforces the very deceptive syncopation established from the opening (listening to this section with a mental emphasis on the downbeats is basically impossible), but also prominently features the E and A#, the two notes missing from the B pentatonic scale from which the RH is built. The B section introduces some nice Lydian colour, while the coda beautifully “corrects” the syncopation heard at the opening (the rhythm hasn’t actually changed, but you hear the main motif’s rhythmic placement the way it’s actually written for the first time at m.80 [4:26]).

La soirée dans Grenade (Evening in Granada) – One of the most striking things Debussy ever wrote. Basically a habanera (its rhythm pervades the whole work), but one made to venture into some very anti-habanera soundscapes – stark, doleful, mystical, wry, and only occasionally joyous. The structure is a sort of interrupted arch form, Intro-ABCB*A*-Coda (sections beginning at mm.1, 7, 38, 67, 98, 122, 130), but there are so many distinct themes in this one speaking of structure isn’t terribly helpful. The most interesting large-scale features of the work are (a) the way the Arabic-scale theme bookends the piece in a kind of rapt stillness, wound around a high octave C# with the D nagging against it, and (b) how the work’s themes recur in an increasingly compressed form after they are first introduced. Harmonically, there are lots of treats here – planing (including the use of chromatic parallel dominant 7th chords for some textural raspiness at 6:12), whole-tone passages, and the use of an A+E pedal point (over which a C# chord ends up sounding like a A maj 7th chord with a b6 thrown in [m.52, 7:31] – a point Debussy cunningly acknowledges when he actually uses the b6 in the minor iv chord a moment later [7:40]).

Jardins sous la pluie (Gardens in the Rain) – ABCD form (sections beginning at mm.1, 75, 100, 126). A taut little toccata study in various rainlike textures – precise and torrential in the first section, tender in the second, rich and swelling in the third, and exultant in the last. Several motifs recur throughout this piece: for instance, the melody from the A section returns in the C Section at m.112 (13:54), while the B section’s melody gets transformed into a little upward flourish in the D section at m.128 (14:14), and then into a big joyful (éclatant, Debussy writes in the score – “brilliant”) leap up from the bass at 14:21 (interspersed with a chromatically planed version of the A section melody).