Debussy: Complete works for piano Vol 3 (Inls 'Deux Arabesques' & 'Children's Corner')

BBC Music Magazine Awards 2009: Instrumental Award Winner

"This third volume confirms Jean-Efflam Bavouzet's winning affinity for Debussy's music. Such familiar pieces as the Suite bergamasque, Deux Arabesques or Children's Corner come across with their colours luminous, their ideas voiced fluently and the moods atmospherically fixed." The Telegraph, 31st May 2008

"Fiercely energised yet superfine, his performances are not for those with comfortable drawing-room notions of Debussy." Gramophone Magazine, July 2008

"…this delightful disc places Debussy's two most modest cycles (Children's Corner and Suite bergamasque) within a broadly chronological sequence of pieces spanning the composer's career." BBC Music Instrumental Award Winner 2009, *****

"Jean-Efflam Bavouzet's Debussy cycle for Chandos gets better with each new installment. Volume 3's appropriately resonant yet warm, ample engineering improves upon the previous volumes' slightly harsh patina in louder, thicker passages. As for Bavouzet, he's one of those rare birds who can honor the composer's wishes yet manage to impart a fresh spin upon familiar material. His intelligent musicality is such that you almost never notice his prodigious technique working wonders. A release to savor."
ClassicsToday 10 [sound] / 10 [performance]

The music now moves to a more playful strand in Debussy's compositional career, with generally shorter pieces of the salon genre, including the two famous collections Children's Corner and Suite bergamasque. In addition to these well-known works are several that are more rarely heard. Two such are La plus que lente, which seems to look ahead to the Études of 1915, and Élégie. Roger Nichols describes the former as 'one of his most delightful pieces… the harmonic turns are particularly sophisticated and enchanting'. The Élégie was written in 1915 following the composer's move to the coast. The outbreak of the First World War had initially depressed Debussy into a state of creative sterility but the move was to prove most productive. The Élégie was written for a charity and, dedicated to Queen Alexandra, honours the role of women in wartime. It is now rarely performed but Roger Nichols writes, 'it is one of the composer's most extraordinary works… and we are left wondering what on earth Debussy would have written in the 1920s and beyond'.

Bavouzet's previous two volumes have been very well received both critically and commercially. In a recent review of volume two the LA Times wrote, 'In what may turn out to be the greatest complete recorded survey of the composer's piano music yet, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet… plays with such bracing clarity that hearing the early Romantic pieces, one feels like jumping into an icy pond after an hour in the sauna'. Of the same volume International Record Review has noted, 'I had the highest praise for Jean-Efflam Bavouzet's first volume of Debussy, and the present disc is fully the equal of that one in terms of colour, refinement of touch, spontaneity and technical finish… Bavouzet has written that his Debussy playing has been influenced by that of Gieseking,

Michelangeli and Richter. You may hear something of each of these pianists in his playing but more than that you will hear his own distinctive and special voice'. This series is a deeply personal project for Bavouzet who has been involved in all aspects of the recording process.