Jean-Bernard Pommier - Debussy: Pour le piano, Children's Corner, Estampes, Arabesques & L'Isle Joyeuse (2009)

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.