Preludes, Krystian Zimerman

Debussy, Claude

album cover

Impressionism, at the Piano

Debussy titled his piano studies the way painters do—to suggest specific images and general points of inspiration. Among these short, richly imagined pieces are renderings of a girl with flaxen hair, "Footprints in the Snow," "The Sunken Cathedral," and the "Gateway to the Alhambra Palace," one of several sketches sent from a shadowy gothic netherworld.

Debussy transfers his distinct symphonic "sound"—lulling orchestrations that suggest calm water—to a lone piano. It's possible to listen to an elegant version of the Preludes, like this one from Polish pianist Krystian Zimerman, and forget that it's coming from eighty-eight keys and three deftly manipulated foot pedals—there are light, hardly pianistic pastels here. Though the music is technically demanding, it rarely sounds that way. The notes almost bend. The chords ooze, leaving no trace of the firm initial attack. Even the few gaudy moments—like "Minstrels," a jazz fantasy inspired by street musicians Debussy wrote in 1905 during the time he was scoring La mer—find the composer working to balance the extroverted theme with more solemn motific elaborations.

In each case Zimerman gets at the composer's intent, and then some. He reads Debussy not note-by-note but shape-by-shape, and inside his contoured interpretations there is, at times, the slightest professorial nudge, as if he's saying, "Listen right here, do not miss the plain and astonishing beauty of this phrase."

Genre: Classical
Released: 1994, Deutsche Grammophon
Key Tracks: "Voiles," "Brouillards," "Gateway to the Alhambra Palace."
Another Interpretation: The Debussy Album, Katia and Marielle Labèque.
Catalog Choice: La mer, Berlin Philharmoic (Herbert von Karajan, cond.)
Next Stop: Frédéric Chopin: Nocturnes, Maria João Pires
After That: Ernesto Lecuona: Ultimate Collection
Book Page: 214