The 150th anniversary of Debussy's birth was celebrated in 2012 in numerous ways: with concerts, exhibitions, scholarly conferences and the publication of books, articles, editions and recordings. Since Debussy's reputation was secured quite some time ago, these anniversary commemorations, while certainly welcome, were hardly necessary to renew interest in him or even to keep him in our consciousness. Still, they can be useful occasions for consolidation and reassessment. In the case of recordings, which are the chief subject of this review, consolidation may take the form of comprehensive collections of a composer's output that offer an overview of either the total oeuvre or a specific genre. Reassessment can arise above all from the discovery and dissemination of compositions that were previously unknown or unrecorded, and perhaps surprisingly for a composer of Debussy's renown, this is an important feature of some recent recordings. Of course, reassessment is also an element of every performance and recording, the degree more or less revelatory depending on the skills, insights, imagination and originality of the performers and whatever specific knowledge they may bring to bear. From the historian's perspective, particularly valuable information may derive from a new edition or source or from knowledge of historical performance practices, including the use of ‘period’ instruments. Although important new editions have been issued by a number of publishers, the most significant stem from the ongoing Oeuvres complètes de Claude Debussy, published by Durand. Their chief novelty is in making previously unpublished works available and in offering new texts of familiar compositions based on the correction of publication errors and the incorporation of post-publication revisions. As for performance practice issues, the literature is substantial and includes first-hand reports: reminiscences and advice from musicians who worked with the composer. One book deserving special mention is Debussy in Performance, edited by James R. Briscoe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), which collects some valuable and provocative essays.

Old recordings constitute our most valuable guide to historically informed performance, but they also underscore how problematic this kind of evidence is. A number of them were made during Debussy's lifetime and the most precious involved his participation: acoustic recordings from 1904 with Mary Garden of three of the Ariettes oubliées and an excerpt from Pelléas, and piano roll recordings from 1913 of 14 piano pieces. We tend to treat recordings as if they were performances, even though they are not. At best, a recording is a representation or ‘translation’ of a performance, one that unavoidably involves a degree of falsification, even if we choose to pretend otherwise. We tacitly assume that our modern recording techniques completely and accurately reproduce sounds exactly as we hear them, even though they don't, whereas the shortcomings of older recordings, which satisfied their original audiences, are obvious to modern ears. We can still delude ourselves, however, as to the degree and kinds of distortion or falsification that recordings present since the original sounds are unavailable for comparison. A recent ‘experiment’ makes this point vividly. On their album, Gershwin by Grofe: Symphonic Jazz (Harmonia Mundi 907492, 2010) the Harmonie Ensemble/New York conducted by Steven Richman offered their performance of The Yankee Doodle Blues on two tracks, the first recorded using modern digital equipment and the second played on a 1909 Edison Fireside Phonograph. In the latter, the dynamic and frequency ranges are compressed conspicuously and drastically. This is obvious. What would not be self-evident were it not for the comparison is the extent to which balances are altered when the acoustic recording techniques were used, to the point that parts of the accompaniment, including the very prominent percussion, disappear almost completely. Performers and engineers of the era, of course, learned to compensate for such misrepresentations through rescoring, specially designed instruments, unorthodox seating plans and other means. This aside, the loss of detail and presence in the acoustic recording give the false impression that the solo playing is simple, direct and un-nuanced. It is quite pleasing on its own terms, cool and remote in comparison with the ‘hot’ and present digital recording, but using it as a model for a historically informed performance could lead to a historically inaccurate result. To be sure, there is valuable information to be gleaned from the old recordings, but they do not tell us precisely how the performances actually sounded.

The discrepancy is even greater with piano rolls and their reproduction, for the sonorities and regulation of the instrument on which they were originally made are anybody's guess. Here again comparisons are instructive. In his 1937 electrical recording of Ravel's ‘Ondine’ from Gaspard de la nuit (Pearl 9449, 1993) Walter Gieseking created a magical shimmer in the opening, whereas his piano roll of the previous decade, as reproduced on the Naxos recording Welte-Mignon Piano Rolls, Volume One (8.110677, 2003), sounds grotesque, like the awkward fumbling of an amateur. Edvard Grieg made roughly contemporaneous acoustic and piano-roll recordings of some of his piano pieces, conveniently juxtaposed on the Simax album, Edvard Grieg: The Piano Music In Historic Interpretations (PSC 1809, 1992). Grieg's 1903 acoustic recording of his popular Lyric Piece ‘Sommerfugl’ (‘Butterfly’), Op. 43, No. 1, may sound rather dim and distant, but his distinctive rubato, lightness of touch and beautiful articulation produce a sensitive and graceful performance of winning charm and delicacy. In his Welte-Mignon piano roll recording of 1906, the rubatos that seemed so tasteful in the acoustic recording sound clumsy, and the playing seems very uneven, at times almost spastic, because the sonorities that justified the tempo modifications have been lost or at best are only crudely approximated. The piano rolls certainly provide valuable information about Grieg's performance, but their reproduction is so far removed from Grieg's actual playing that they cannot give us a very accurate impression of the sounds and consequently of the expressive effect of his performance.Footnote ¹

Our tendency to exaggerate the value of recordings probably stems from the fact that they are the primary medium through which we consume music today. It was not always thus. Vladimir Horowitz was part of a generation, now gone, for which the live performance was the essential medium for the production and reception of music, and his interpretive decisions reflected this priority. He understood as well as anybody the commercial value and prestige attached to audio and video broadcasts and recordings and was a clever negotiator in this regard, but in terms of artistic value I doubt that he ranked them very high in relation to his live performances. In an interview, Horowitz blasted the New York Times critic Harold Schonberg for relying primarily on recordings in his estimation of Rachmaninoff's playing:

In contrast, I daresay that most younger performers, growing up as they did in the era of the splice, probably prefer to represent their interpretations with edited studio products. The ‘concert dropout’ Glenn Gould, a musician and intellect I greatly admire, represents this attitude to an extreme, though I can testify from personal experience that in concert he was mesmerizing. Indeed, the artists I admire most are the ones whose best live performances are better than their best recordings, but I won't name them here.

Problems thus arise in relation to Debussy's recordings and their possible relevance to historically informed performance and by extension to editions of his music. Even if we reject the notion that these recordings give a truly meaningful impression of his playing, they contain information, and an interest in historical performance practice compels us to consider whether any of his performance decisions might or even should be incorporated into anyone else's performances. Further, are any of these decisions intrinsic to the music, warranting a place in an edition, or do they apply only to performance? Where they constitute quantifiable deviations from the score, may we treat them as corrections, alternative readings or revisions worthy of being incorporated into the score, even if only as an option? Or could some deviations merely be uncorrected errors in the performance, that is, ‘wrong’ notes (for piano rolls could be edited) and therefore best be forgotten? Two extreme positions might be adopted: (1) that the performer's responsibility is to the score and thus the composer's performance decisions have no relevance beyond his own performance, or (2) that if our goal is to play the music as the composer intended, we should imitate his performance as closely as possible. The former might be defensible except that there are places where the piano rolls persuasively solve ‘problems’ or resolve inconsistencies in the editions, like missing notes in ‘Danseuses de Delphes’ or most famously, tempo relations in ‘La cathédrale engloutie’. (When, oh when, will we stop having to endure performances in which the 3/2 bars are twice too slow?) And once we admit that some aspects of the composer's recorded performance have editorial or textual significance, we open the door to a consideration and weighing of all variants, and here subjective judgment necessarily comes into play. This problem has been explored and discussed at length by Roy Howat, and his conclusions are incorporated into the volumes that he edited for the Oeuvres complètes de Claude Debussy. My own position is heavily influenced by his arguments, and I thoroughly agree with his principles even if I may disagree with particular editorial decisions based on them. More about this later.

Debussy's acoustic and piano roll recordings have been reissued a number of times, and the complete collection is currently available on the compact disc Claude Debussy: The Composer as Pianist (Pierian Recording Society 1, 2000), which can be strongly recommended; it also includes Debussy's four acoustic recordings with Mary Garden. The Garden–Debussy recordings are also available on the EMI release of Roger Désormière's Pelléas (EMI 45782, 2006) and in Ward Marston's expert transfers on Legendary Piano Recordings: The Complete Grieg, Saint-Saëns, Pugno and Diémer and Other G&T Rarities (Marston 52054-2, 2008). Reissues of historic recordings of Debussy's music are too numerous to mention, and they tend to go in and out of the catalogue fairly rapidly. Margaret G. Cobb's Discographie de l'oeuvre de Claude Debussy (Genève: Minkoff, 1975) documents recordings of the pre-LP era (that is, those made between 1902 and 1950) and is an indispensable guide to the extant early recordings, even if many of them may be very hard to find. Alas, two of the more valuable anthologies of historic recordings, both on the Andante label, are currently out of print. Debussy: Pelléas et Mélisande (Andante AN 3990, 2002) supplements a reissue of Roger Désormière's classic 1941 recording with excerpts led by Piero Coppola in 1927, Georges Truc in 1928, Gustave Cloez in 1928 (with Germaine Cernay's Geneviève) and Albert Wolff in 1930. Debussy: Orchestral Music (Andante AN 1200, 2005) gathers orchestral recordings made between 1929 and 1951. Piero Coppola's recordings constitute the core of the collection, but they are augmented by recordings conducted by John Barbirolli, Henri Büsser, Roger Désormière, Désiré-Émile Inghelbrecht, Sylvain Levin, Pierre Monteux, Fritz Reiner, Walther Straram and Arturo Toscanini. Some duplication of repertory allows for comparative listening. The second CD, for example, is given over to three performances of La mer: Coppola's (1932), Toscanini's (1950) and Désormière's (1950), the last of which Sviatoslav Richter considered ‘the most beautiful in the whole history of the gramophone’.Footnote ³

Happily, another stimulating historic anthology remains available, Claude Debussy: Images pour piano (Centre de documentation Claude Debussy, Bibliothèque nationale de Paris, Ysaÿe Records IM01, 2000). It gathers between one and six versions of each of the six Images for piano, recorded by a variety of pianists between 1926 and 1949, most notably a 1930 recording of ‘Poissons d'or’ by Ricardo Viñes, a friend of the composer and champion of his music. Also of historical interest is Marius-François Gaillard's ‘Reflets dans l'eau’ of 1928. Gaillard, another early advocate, performed Debussy's complete published piano music in the 1920s and, starting in 1928, produced 16 recordings of this repertory for Odéon. Another rarity is the first complete traversal of the first series of Images, recorded in 1943 by Jean Doyen, who counted Marguerite Long among his teachers.

The noteworthy historical release of the Debussy anniversary year is Album Debussy: Le compositeur et ses interprètes (Aeon AECD 1215, 2012), a three-CD set issued along with a gorgeous catalogue in connection with the exhibition ‘Debussy, la musique et les arts’ (Paris, Musée de l'Orangerie, 22 February–11 June 2012, and Tokyo, Bridgestone Museum of Art, 14 July–14 October 2012). Jean-Michel Nectoux, one of the curators of this remarkable exhibition, demonstrated the same exquisite taste in his selection of the recordings. The set is organized by genres. The first CD contains mélodies sung by Mary Garden (with Debussy at the piano), Ninon Vallin, Claire Croiza, Jane Bathori, Irène Joachin and Gérard Souzay, and piano music played by Ricardo Viñes (‘La soirée dans Grenade’ and ‘Poissons d'or’), Benno Moiseiwitsch, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Arthur Rubinstein and Marcelle Meyer. The second CD is devoted to orchestral music. It juxtaposes Camille Chevillard and Walther Straram in Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune and Arturo Toscanini and Roger Désormière in La mer and adds Pierre Monteux in ‘Nuages’ and ‘Fêtes’ from Trois nocturnes. The third CD contains music for voice, mostly with orchestra: excerpts from Pelléas – Mary Garden accompanied by Debussy in Mélisande's song from the tower, some excerpts conducted by Georges Truc in 1928 with a cast that included Hector Dufranne, the creator of the role of Golaud, and Claire Croiza as Geneviève, and excerpts from 1927 conducted by Piero Coppola with Yvonne Brothier's Mélisande, Charles Panzéra's Pelléas and Vanni-Marcoux's Golaud – plus the ‘Récit et air de Lia’ from L'enfant prodigue and orchestral songs with Vallin and Souzay. André Caplet's ‘Forêt’ from Le vieux coffret, sung by Panzéra, is offered as a bonus.

To supplement Nectoux's superb selections I would have tried to find room for Maggie Teyte, who succeeded Mary Garden in the role of Mélisande and was, to my mind, the finest and most expressive singer of this repertory. Teyte's recordings of Debussy songs with pianist Alfred Cortot are available as an appendix to the EMI release of Désormière's Pelléas (EMI 45782, 2006); these plus more Debussy with Gerald Moore, including excerpts from Pelléas, are on Naxos (8.110147, 2001, and 8.110757-58, 2003). It is from these early singers that today's performers stand to learn the most. Mary Garden recalled that Debussy addressed the original cast of Pelléas at their first rehearsal with the admonition and request: ‘Mesdames et Messieurs… Everyone must forget that he is a singer before he can sing the music of Debussy. Oubliez, je vous prie, que vous êtes chanteurs!’Footnote ⁴ Indeed Debussy's music calls for a different balance between singing and declamation than what we are accustomed to today, and the best of these early singers deployed countless nuances and connected notes in countless subtle ways to shape a lyrical line while persuading the listener that it is all in the service of expressive diction.Footnote ⁵ One finds these same speech-song qualities transferred to instrumental music in Joseph Szigeti's unforgettable performance of Debussy's Violin Sonata with Béla Bartók, recorded live on 13 April 1940 at the Library of Congress in Washington (Vanguard Classics OVC 8008, 2004). Szigeti's deeply moving playing makes us want to take literally Debussy's sardonic remark that the sonata ‘will be interesting … as an example of what an invalid can write in time of war’.Footnote ⁶

When it comes to mélodies, a recital of early Debussy songs (1880–82) by Natalie Dessay and pianist Philippe Cassard entitled Clair de lune (Virgin Classics 730769-2, 2012), is probably the most valuable CD release of the Debussy year, for it offers world premiere recordings of two songs: ‘Romance’ (on Maurice Bouchor's poem ‘Non, les baisirs d'amour’) and ‘Les elfes’ (Leconte de Lisle) – at 175 bars, Debussy's longest song. Two other early songs are billed as world premieres, ‘L'archet’ (Charles Cros) and ‘Le matelot qui tombe à l'eau’ (Maurice Bouchor) – Debussy's shortest song, at 15 bars – but they were recorded in 1999 by François Le Roux and Noël Lee (Le Chant du Monde, LDC 2781115), the latter song under the title ‘On entend un chant’, taken from the first line the poem. That same year, Véronique Dietschy and Emmanuel Strosser also recorded ‘L'archet’ (Adès 465 718-2, 2000; reissued in The Debussy Edition, Deutsche Grammophon 4790056, 2012). Dessay can nonetheless justify her claim to the two additional premieres on the grounds that her performances are based on newly discovered manuscript sources that offer, among other differences, an introductory bar for ‘Le matelot qui tombe à l'eau’ and an additional five bars at the end of ‘L'archet’ to set the otherwise missing one-and-a-half final lines of the poem. The four new songs, published in 2012 as Quatre nouvelles melodies (1882) pour voix et piano, edited by Denis Herlin (Paris: Durand), constitute the most important Debussy edition of the anniversary year. It would be a mistake to dismiss these songs as juvenilia. In comparison with his early instrumental works, which despite many felicitous ideas too often seem overly derivative and at times even banal, Debussy's early songs display a surprising maturity, no doubt owing to his sensitive response to the poetry, and they deserve a place in the repertory.

Natalie Dessay is one of today's opera superstars (and an esteemed Mélisande), and I count myself among her many fans. We must be grateful indeed that she has chosen this rare repertoire for her first recital recording. Debussy composed many of his early songs for his muse, Marie-Blanche Vasnier, and they require agility in a very high tessitura, something for which Dessay is justly celebrated. She has a gorgeous voice, but the vocal devices that are so effective in Romantic opera and her tendency to rely on a pronounced vibrato as an expressive device can sound misplaced in these songs and hinder the delivery of the poetry, which seems to call for a somewhat simpler style. Pianist Philippe Cassard is a most sensitive collaborator, but his playing is too often expressive in a generic way where one might wish for something more mysterious, magical or ravishing. The close miking doesn't help. Ambiguities in the manuscripts of some of these early songs pose significant editorial challenges, so for the benefit of future singers and pianists I would like to mention prominent mistakes that mar most editions of two of the songs in this recital. In ‘Apparition’, restoring an overlooked natural sign in the voice on the seventh beat of bar 12 (F♮ instead of F♯) fixes a harmonic non sequitur,Footnote ⁷ and in the early version of ‘Clair de lune’, reinstating an all'ottava sign that appears in the manuscript but is missing in the editions raises the pianist's right hand an octave in the song's last five bars, producing a more magical evocation of the mysteries of the moonlit night.

The 18 songs in this recital include the exotic ‘Flots, palmes, sables’, accompanied by piano and harp, played by Catherine Michel, and the generously filled CD concludes with a performance with piano of the poème lyrique La damoiselle élue. In a letter of February 1908 to Jane Bathori, Debussy objected to a public performance of this work with piano accompaniment, but he wrote the part so beautifully that it is worth hearing from time to time, as it is here, with Karine Deshayes as the narrator and the Jeune choeur de Paris, conducted by Henri Chalet.

Another aspect of historical performance practice concerns the use of original instruments. Jos Van Immerseel has made recordings of Debussy's piano music (Channel Classics 4892, 1992) and mélodies (with Sandrine Piau, Naïve 4932, 2003) using a piano of Debussy's time – an 1897 Erard – although there is no compelling connection between the specific instrument or even the make and the composer. Whatever merits these recordings have, the instrument itself plays a very small part. More recently Van Immerseel has released a ‘live’ recording of orchestral music, conducting a period-instrument ensemble, the Anima Eterna Brugge (Zig Zag Territoires ZZT313, 2012), but I have not yet heard it. This reflects a recent trend, as Andrew Clements observed in his review of the recording in The Guardian (31 October 2012):

More recently, François-Xavier Roth and Les Siècles, the period-instrument orchestra he founded in 2003, released La mer and the world premiere recording of the Première suite d'orchestre (its third movement orchestrated by Philippe Manoury), taken from live performances in 2012 (Actes Sud ASM 10, 2013). Period-orchestra Debussy will have to be a subject for a future review.

Murray Perahia has rightly observed that the proponents of historically informed performance are quick to point out the advantages of original instruments but never mention their disadvantages. This wouldn't matter if those who perform on original instruments made us forget those disadvantages because what they did was so completely persuasive and satisfying. Speaking personally and thinking primarily of solo rather than ensemble playing, such positive experiences are more common with wind instruments than with strings, although Yo-Yo Ma's delightful recordings of Boccherini concertos on a retrofitted cello with Ton Koopman and the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra are completely winning (Simply Baroque, Sony SK 60680, 1999, and Simply Baroque II, Sony SK 60681, 2000). When it comes to historic pianos, comparable successes are extremely rare, more the exception than the rule. One of those rare exceptions is Peter Serkin's miraculous recording of Schubert dances on a Conrad Graf fortepiano (two Pro-Arte LP's, PAD 168 and 171, released in 1984 and partially reissued in 2002 on Pro-Arte CD 358). Here, a great pianist and a musician of real genius has both the technical skill and the imagination necessary to mine the full potential of the instrument, conveying profound expression while producing sounds that one had never imagined possible on this or any instrument. Of course, this is what we hope for from every performance, regardless of the choice of instrument. But we must never forget that it is people, not instruments, who make music. And nothing could be more false than the argument that the inherent qualities of a musical instrument bring with them inherent limitations.

Perhaps the original instrument that matters most for Debussy's music is the Pleyel chromatic harp, for which he wrote the Danse sacrée et Danse profane. This work, composed for the concours of the Brussels Conservatory, is almost always played in a transcription for diatonic harp, and performances on the chromatic harp, as heard on two recordings by harpist Francette Bartholomée, either with the Quatuor Kleve and Ferenc Bokany (Cyprès CYP1615, 2005) or with the Quatuor Danel and Korneel Le Compte (Fuga Libera FUG595, 2012), are as rare as performances of Schubert's ‘Arpeggione’ Sonata on an arpeggione.

A particular instrument, the Blüthner piano, is the raison d’être for a new cycle of the complete piano music, divided among a quartet of young prize-winning pianists representing different schools and nations – Juliana Steinbach (Brazil), Amir Tebenikhin (Russia), Chenyin Li (China) and Julia Dahlkvist (of Finnish-Russian descent) – in order to demonstrate the universality of Debussy's music (Hommage à Debussy: Works for Piano, Genuin Classics GEN 12226-12229, 2012). As Ingbert Blüthner explains in an introductory note, Debussy purchased a Blüthner boudoir grand in 1905 while vacationing in Eastbourne (No. 65614, built in 1903 and currently in the Musée Labenche in Brive-la-Gaillarde, France). He moved the piano to Paris and kept it in his home for the rest of his life. It has a kind of English action, with a light touch and fast repetitions, and the Aliquot fourth string system, whereby a fourth string for each note in the top three octaves vibrates through resonance instead of being struck by the hammer. The present recordings were made not on Debussy's instrument, even though it has been restored to playable condition, but on a modern Blüthner regulated to approximate the qualities of that instrument and therefore said to match ‘the taste and known preference of the composer’. The distinctive Blüthner resonance has been assiduously captured in these vivid recordings, but how it is deployed is entirely up to the pianists. Chenyin Li exploits it to create a rather striking sonority after the descending glissandi on the last page of ‘Feux d'artifice’. She also produces beautiful and evocative sonorities in ‘Canope’.

Young artists are generally advised to avoid recording familiar repertory that invites comparison with the great pianists of the past, so it was a bold decision to enter this highly competitive field. The works were equitably distributed. Each pianist was assigned at least one major set plus a smattering of short pieces, and they all acquit themselves very well, easily rising to the musical and technical challenges, though without erasing memories of their most celebrated predecessors. They certainly deserve the exposure that these recordings should give them.

If I may over generalize, after listening to the four of them play more than five hours of quite varied music, they seem more interested in notes and rhythms than in the effects of sound, the projection of line and the articulation of form, and the expression often feels generalized, in music that is highly characteristic and calls for a specific, individualized response. In ‘La danse de Puck’, for example, the character that Shakespeare called ‘that shrewd and knavish sprite’ and ‘that merry wanderer of the night’ comes off as a rather dull chap. And ‘Minstrels’, marked nerveux et avec humour, is not much fun. Debussy, we know, deplored over-pedaling. He claimed that pianists ‘abused’ the pedal to camouflage their weak techniques and remarked that ‘making a lot of noise is a way to drown the music you're slaughtering!’ But he also spoke with admiration of hearing Liszt ‘turning the pedal into a kind of breathing’, and while I admit generally to liking a ‘wetter’ sound in Debussy than the composer seemed to advocate, a combination of a more nuanced touch with the subtle use of the pedal would have been welcome throughout.Footnote ⁸ Debussy's oft-quoted plea to pianists seeking his guidance, ‘above all make me forget, as I listen to you, that the piano has hammers’, came often to mind.Footnote ⁹

The Études, of course, pose the greatest challenge, and hearing them usually brings to mind an experience I had years ago while listening with Murray Perahia to a brand new recording of the Chopin Études played by a much-touted young pianist. After about four or five of them Perahia delivered his verdict: ‘They sound like etudes’. That is also the case here, but it needn't be so. That old magician Vladimir Horowitz left recordings of only four of the Études, three of them from live performances, but he showed us what exquisite and miraculous tone poems they really are, no less evocative than the more obviously descriptive Préludes. In comparison, Maurizio Pollini's justly admired recording (on Deutsche Grammophon) sounds modern and analytical, and Mitsuko Uchida's (originally on Philips), attractive but observed rather than inhabited.

The Genuin Classics set comes nicely packaged and is enhanced by the excellent notes of Roy Howat, which accompany the digipak of each volume and are gathered in a booklet for the box set. Even better are the more extensive notes that he wrote for his own four-volume set of the complete piano music, recorded between 1995 and 2002 and issued by the Australian Tall Poppies label between 1997 and 2003 (TP094, TP123, TP164 and TP165). It is a pity that these recordings are not better known or distributed, at least in North America. They were the subject of a substantial review article by Nigel Simeone in an earlier issue of this journal (Vol. 2, No. 2 (2005), pp. 196–201), so my own comments will be brief.

As the editor of most of the volumes of solo piano works in the Oeuvres complètes de Claude Debussy, Howat knows the musical texts and their sources better than anybody. He has written revelatory articles and books on this literature, including his masterful The Art of French Piano Music: Debussy, Ravel, Fauré, Chabrier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), which should be compulsory reading for pianists. Most relevant to this review is Chapter 21, ‘The Composer as Pianist’, which includes perceptive analyses of Debussy's recordings, but elsewhere his analytical observations and practical suggestions are also extremely valuable. He is an excellent pianist, and his is the most complete collection of the solo piano works to date, as it includes premiere recordings of two pieces discovered in 2001: the Intermède, a solo version of the second movement of the 1880 Piano Trio, and Les soirs illuminés par l'ardeur du charbon, written in 1917 for a coal supplier, presumably to settle a bill. These recordings have a further significance now that the complete solo piano works of the Oeuvres complètes de Claude Debussy have been published, in that they show us that Howat the editor and Howat the pianist are not always in agreement as to which variant should be the primary reading of a given passage. This is as it should be.

In The Art of French Piano Music, Howat reproduces a 1914 review of a concert in which Debussy provided song accompaniments for Ninon Vallin:

This could also serve as a description of Howat's own playing and his interpretive ideal. All in all, this collection is both musically satisfying and intellectually stimulating.

The most obviously commemorative releases of the anniversary year are two eighteen-CD compilation box sets: The Debussy Edition from Deutsche Grammophon (47900566) and The Claude Debussy Collection from Sony (19311792). Both are welcome and both serve up a lot of Debussy in all of the major genres to which he contributed, yet both are disappointing in that they are not what they might have been. At the outset it must be said what they are not: complete editions, like the Philips Complete Mozart Edition of 1991 or the Deutsche Grammophon Complete Beethoven Edition of 1997, which, within reasonable limits, collected those composers’ complete works, supplementing their existing catalogues with new recordings or licensing them from other companies. These Debussy collections make no such claims to completeness. Nothing was recorded expressly for them, and the labels did not fully mine their back catalogues. Consequently, there are gaps, though the significance of those gaps is a matter of opinion. Indeed, all that the Deutsche Grammophon (DG) Debussy Edition promises is that it will cover ‘the whole range of his output’, a vague enough characterization.

So what is missing? Both sets omit the two unfinished operas that were posthumously reconstructed: Rodrigue et Chimène (available on Erato 998508, 1995) and La chute de la maison Usher (formerly on EMI). They also omit the choruses and the two cantatas, Le gladiateur (1883) and L'enfant prodigue (1884), that Debussy wrote for the Prix de Rome competitions. These were recorded in 2009 by soloists and ensembles directed by Hervé Niquet and released by Glossa in a two-CD digipak (GCD 922206) and in a limited edition with an excellent 115-page book of essays (GBS 922206-F). Debussy cared enough about L'enfant prodigue to revise it for publication in his maturity, but all that we get of it in the present sets is excerpts: the famous Air de Lia, sung by Leontyne Price on Sony and by Inge Borkh on DG, plus, on DG only, the ‘Cortège et air de danse’, but in its piano duet transcription, rather than with orchestra. DG chose not to include two Prix de Rome choruses, Salut printemps (1882) and Invocation (1883), which it had in its back catalogue in a 1980 recording conducted by Daniel Barenboim. Another unnecessary omission, and an especially regrettable one, is the reconstructed Chansons de Bilitis incidental music (1900) that Debussy wrote to accompany readings of 12 poems by Pierre Louÿs and tableaux vivants of scantily clad women. (He later recycled some of this music in the Six épigraphes antiques.) Columbia Records (Sony) issued a recording of it in 1964, conducted by Robert Craft and with Vera Zorina as the récitante, while a DG recording by Ensemble Wien-Berlin with Catherine Deneuve was released in 1990. This would have been the perfect occasion to restore these recordings to the catalogue. Sony also omitted the Trois chansons de Charles d'Orléans (1898/1908) for four-part mixed chorus, though they had access to a recording by the Swingle Singers from their album English and French Part Songs (RCA Red Seal 25112, 1976).

Of the orchestral music, both sets left out the incidental music for Le roi Lear, which was orchestrated by Roger-Ducasse. DG omitted the Rapsodie for saxophone and orchestra, another Roger-Ducasse orchestration, and Sony, the ballet Khamma. Pierre Boulez, a leading Debussy conductor of our time, presides over most of the central orchestral works in both sets. On Sony, the major compositions are divided between Boulez and Charles Munch, the former with the New Philharmonia and Cleveland Orchestras from the late 1960s, the latter with the Boston Symphony Orchestra from the late 1950s and early 1960s. These two great conductors are very different in temperament, and their juxtaposition serves to highlight their differences and allow us to savour all the more the special qualities that each brought to Debussy's music. On DG we get Boulez's Cleveland Orchestra recordings from the 1990s, though his recording of the Deux danses for harp and orchestra was bypassed in favour of an older recording by Bernard Haitink. (On Sony, for some inexplicable reason, this admittedly appealing work appears three times, played by Alice Chalifoux with Boulez conducting, by Xavier de Maistre leading members of the Vienna Philharmonic and by Marisa Robles with James Galway conducting, where it is misidentified as an arrangement by Galway for flute, viola, harp and orchestra. Even stranger is that the recording of the Sonata for flute, viola and harp is wrongly listed as having been similarly arranged. I was almost afraid to listen to it.) DG also omitted Boulez's recording with Alison Hagley of Debussy's orchestrations of four of his songs, presumably because the songs were already represented by their original versions, with piano, and the orchestral versions were judged a repertoire redundancy. By way of compensation, DG's eighteenth CD, a ‘bonus’ disc of historical performances, includes Gérard Souzay's 1950 recording of three songs with orchestra (only one of them orchestrated by Debussy); the same three tracks are also included in Album Debussy: Le compositeur et ses interprètes, discussed above. Souzay, in superb voice, gives us a veritable master class in the art of singing Debussy. This bonus disc is the only place where DG indulged in repertoire duplications, the other instance being Friedrich Gulda's dazzling but slightly driven L'isle joyeuse, also from 1950. DG elected to offer the Marche écossaise, Berceuse héroïque and Tarantelle styrienne in their orchestral versions (the last orchestrated by Maurice Ravel under the title Danse), rather than in the original versions for piano duet or solo piano. Sony included the latter two only among the piano works and omitted the Marche écossaise entirely.

DG boasts ‘critically acclaimed recordings by great artists’, and this goal is nowhere more apparent than with the piano music. Each disc is devoted to a particular pianist, and consequently most are not generously filled, ranging from 40 to 46 minutes. Two feature Krystian Zimerman's recordings of the two books of Préludes, one Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli's Images and Children's Corner, and another Mitsuko Uchida's Études. Most sets of the complete piano music fill four CD's, but here, even a fifth is insufficient to cover the repertory. DG had access to two integral series, by Jean-Yves Thibaudet (from Decca) and Zoltán Kocsis (from Philips), but the former's cycle was earmarked for Decca's six-disc Debussy Piano Edition, so the honour fell to the latter. Even at 81 minutes and 26 seconds, and exempting the piano pieces that are represented by their orchestrations, the Kocsis disc could not accommodate 10 or so of the works we would have expected to find. DG had the felicitous idea of including them (or, I should say, most of them) on the ‘bonus’ disc of historical recordings in beautiful performances by Daniel Ericourt (1903–1998). Ericourt knew Debussy and his family, though he was only fifteen when the composer died. He claimed to have been Debussy's page-turner at the Paris premiere of the Cello Sonata, which would have put him in very close proximity to Debussy's playing when he was at a very impressionable age. He recorded the complete piano music for Kapp Records between 1960 and 1961, and Ivory Records reissued it on CD on the occasion of his one-hundredth birthday (73006). Like so much else, it remains available only as an MP3 download, aside from the seven short pieces offered here. The DG set is still missing not only the two recently discovered pieces premiered by Roy Howat, but also two pieces that Kocsis had recorded and that therefore should have been included: the relatively unfamiliar Élégie and the ever-popular La plus que lente, one of Debussy's most appealing piano pieces. Ericourt's La plus que lente should have replaced Gulda's L'isle joyeuse.

Owing to these oversights, Sony's piano collection is more complete than DG's, though less so than Howat's. Paul Crossley's very fine 1992 recordings of the complete piano music constitute the core of the Sony collection, but some works are taken over by the senior French pianists in the Sony stable (Children's Corner by Robert Casadesus and Pour le piano, Images and Deux Arabesques by Philippe Entremont). We also get one piece each from their superstars: a suave La plus que lente from Arthur Rubinstein and a thrilling ‘live’ L'isle joyeuse from Horowitz, complete with applause.

Due to the large number of transcriptions and recently discovered early works, neither set includes the complete piano duets and works for two pianos, which could easily fill three CD's. Instead we get only one in each set. On Sony, Robert and Gaby Casadesus offer idiomatic performances of the essentials: Petite suite, Six Épigraphes antiques and En blanc et noir. On DG Alfons and Aloys Kontarsky add four more pieces – Lindaraja, ‘Cortège et air de danse’, Ballade and Symphonie en si mineur – and play them all with exceptional clarity and sensitivity.

In chamber music, Sony has the advantage in terms of the quantity of repertoire, with two discs to DG's one. In addition to the core collection that DG provides – the Quartet, the three Sonatas and Syrinx – Sony offers the Piano Trio, Scherzo for cello and piano (almost always called Nocturne et scherzo, even though there is no Nocturne) and Petite pièce for clarinet and piano, tucked away with the orchestra works. A regrettable omission from both sets is Intermezzo for cello and piano. The cellist Gregor Piatigorsky owned the manuscript and published his own arrangement of it, in which he departed significantly from Debussy's score to make it a more effective showpiece for his instrument. For the chamber music discs, the labels brought out some of their stars, including Isaac Stern, Lynn Harrell, James Levine, André Previn, Jean-Pierre Rampal, James Galway and the Tokyo Quartet on Sony, and Mischa Maisky, Martha Argerich, Augustin Dumay and Maria João Pires on DG.

In the songs, DG has the clear advantage in terms of repertoire. By appropriating the four discs that Véronique Dietschy recorded with pianists Philippe Cassard and Emmanuel Strosser for the Adès label between 1993 and 2002, they offer here the most complete collection of Debussy mélodies to date. Not all of the 90 or so songs that Debussy composed have yet been published; these four discs contain 74. In comparison, the ‘reference’ three-disc EMI set, with Elly Ameling, Michèle Command, Mady Mesplé, Frederica von Stade, Gérard Souzay and pianist Dalton Baldwin, includes only 60, and the Sony set, 38 (if we count two songs that replace the original piano accompaniments with harp transcriptions). Therefore, if repertory acquisition is your chief aim, these four discs alone would justify the purchase of the DG set, though you would still need Natalie Dessay's recital for its premieres. Dietschy does not erase memories of the greatest performances of these songs, but she is an intelligent singer, her voice is clear and reliable, and she is able to manage easily the high-flying early songs as well as the low-lying ones for medium voice, like the Chansons de Bilitis. I do not recommend it for a single sitting, but it is an excellent library reference collection. These discs also include her performance of La damoiselle élue with piano (Philippe Cassard, the same pianist who accompanied Dessay in this work), a good decision from the perspective of the completist wanting all four of Dietschy's discs intact. But given DG's principle of one version per work, it means we are denied the ‘real’ orchestral version of this ravishing composition.

Sony allots only two discs to the mélodies, and significant space is taken up with the orchestral Damoiselle élue and the Air de Lia from L'enfant prodigue. The omissions are too numerous and painful to list, but they include such important collections as Proses lyriques, Trois ballades de François Villon and Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé. More positively, the singing is wonderful throughout. For me, though, the highlight is the restoration to the catalogue of five mélodies sung by Eileen Farrell, a truly great artist we would not immediately associate with this repertoire, sensitively partnered by George Trovillo. Singing of such beauty, nuance, subtlety, finish and depth is all that one could hope for; it is a pity that the other Debussy songs she recorded were not included, presumably because they duplicated individual songs within the sets that were assigned to the other singers. And these other singers are very good indeed – Dawn Upshaw with James Levine and Frederica von Stade with Martin Katz – though they do not cover nearly enough terrain. If only Sony had followed DG's example, dug deeper into their back catalogues, and compiled a disc of historical recordings! High on my wish-list would be Lily Pons, Bidú Sayão and more Eileen Farrell. We could also have had Erich Leinsdorf's Pelléas Suite with the Cleveland Orchestra, those Horowitz Études and some of the exquisite pre-war recordings by pianist Walter Gieseking. Two CD's worth from the series that he made between 1927 and 1939 are available on VAI Audio (Walter Gieseking plays Debussy, VAIA 1117-2, 1995): almost two hours and twenty minutes of pure heaven. His Préludes and Estampes from that era comprised an entire disc of the second Gieseking volume in the Philips Great Pianists of Twentieth Century series, currently out of print. If Sony had given us a generous helping of these historical recordings I would have had no complaints about duplications or worried so much about the omissions.

It would be hard to choose between the two competing Pelléas recordings – Claudio Abbado for DG and Pierre Boulez for Sony – because both are among my favourites. Also very fine are the two concert versions drawn from the incidental music for Le martyre de saint Sébastien, conducted by Ernest Ansermet on DG and Michael Tilson Thomas on Sony. Tilson Thomas simulates the work's theatrical origin by having the mellifluous Leslie Caron provide linking and superimposed narration (en français). Ansermet includes only the music and benefits from some glorious singing by Suzanne Danco. Sony, alas, provides neither texts nor translations for any of the vocal music in their set. DG offers them as a downloadable PDF file through their Web site, a recent, annoying trend in the industry, but far better than nothing.

Perhaps to compensate for their stinginess with the mélodies, Sony devotes two discs to ‘encores’, and a good number of them are instrumental transcriptions of songs. Arrangements and transcriptions figure very prominently in Debussy's oeuvre, its dissemination and reception. The composer himself made quite a number of them, and he authorized other individuals to produce a good many more on his behalf. He also made piano duet and two-piano transcriptions of music by other composers – Schumann, Saint-Saëns, Tchaikovsky and Wagner – largely, we presume, to generate income, though his exquisite arrangement for two pianos of Schumann's Six Canonic Etudes for pedal piano is a major contribution to the repertoire; it successfully rescued this magnificent work from the organ, where it was never comfortable. In the Catalogue de l'oeuvre de Claude Debussy that Durand published in 1962 about as many pages are devoted to orchestrations, transcriptions, arrangements and extracts as to original compositions, and the arrangements are for every imaginable configuration, including ‘Le petit berger’ for mandolin, Le petit nègre for saxophone quartet and ‘La fille aux cheveux de lin’ for Harmonie militaire américaine. Today, ‘Clair de lune’ and Rêverie are probably heard more often in arrangements than for solo piano; in the Sony set we get three arrangements of the former and two of the latter. Matthew Brown has written a fascinating and highly entertaining book, Debussy Redux: The Impact of His Music on Popular Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), on Debussy borrowings in, to quote my blurb for the dust jacket, ‘everything from ‘30 s swing tunes, ‘40 s movie scores, ‘50 s lounge/exotica, ‘70 s rock and animation, ‘80 s action films, and Muzak’. If he had been invited to curate one of these discs we would have been in for a real treat. Even if Debussy would not have recognized his own music, he might have enjoyed having a disc pour épater le bourgeoisie. As it is, Sony scoured its catalogue to devote one CD, titled ‘Encores’, to arrangements of popular short pieces played by James Galway, Richard Stoltzman, Isaac Stern, Vladimir Spivakov and best of all, five selections by the immortal Jascha Heifetz, representing the highest imaginable level of technical mastery and musical artistry, even if it has nothing to do with any performance style that can be traced to the composer. A second ‘encore’ disc is squandered on ‘Debussy on Harp’, featuring Xavier de Maistre playing the Deux danses plus harp arrangements that are mostly of his own devising, including seven early mélodies in which he accompanies Diana Damrau. Probably too quiet for the car stereo (though it might prove soothing if you're stalled in traffic), this disc could be useful as background music for an intimate dinner party or a yoga class, but I don't think it was the best way to honour Debussy on the occasion of his 150th birthday.

I suppose I am expected to conclude with a recommendation. As is characteristic of the labels, DG aspires to be highbrow while Sony aims for the middle. Each set has advantages and drawbacks, yet despite the disappointments that I expressed along the way, both offer for the most part quite excellent recordings that, as DG put it, cover ‘the whole range of his output’. And both include some priceless performances that are not available elsewhere.