Debussy: Images / Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune / Printemps

This is a great recording to keep you listening. The harmonies that we hear in Debussy are very much a part of modern music of all types, not only classical. But at the turn of the 19th century they were almost too unique to be well accepted. This recording has music that is sometimes peaceful and at others times energetic, but it always has this slightly mysterious tonality due to Debussy's love of harmonies that implied both major and minor keys. Some of these works have been so well accepted by the 21st century that we almost hear them as easy listening, but they are still filled with an uplifting spirit that is haunting, mysterious, and engaging. If you listen closely I think you will smile and laugh at how melodic and moving Debussy can be even as you shake your head with the boldness of the transitions. By comparison to 'modern classical' music you will find this work accessible and easy to like because it is always musical even as it pushes the boundaries of harmony.

Debussy, Boulez, Cleveland on DGG on a high-end system--

what else is there to say?

I bought this for Images complete, to supplement a NAXOS recording

"The Very Best of Debussy" which only had two movements of it.

I highly recommend that as well.

I've been having a Debussy renaissance since last summer.

There was still a great deal I was unfamiliar with.

This excellent album has helped fill the void

Pierre Boulez and the Cleveland Orchestra deliver another top shelf performance. Having purchased Boulez other Debussy recording on DG with the Cleveland Orchestra (which i enjoyed), I felt this cd was a safe bet, and I was not dissapointed.

Boulez once made the remark that the Cleveland Orchestra sounded more French than the French corchestras. While it can be debated whether or not this is true, the Images and Prelude on this disc are outstanding, with the Printempts as a nice bonus.

My only gripe with the disc (a minor gripe), is that DG could have included another small Debussy work on this CD, as at 59 minutes, the disc seems a little short. However, that does not change my belief that this is an excellent disc, on par with Boulez earlier recordings for Sony.

One is immediately impressed with the recording quality here -- vivid, up-close and intimate -- combined with precise ensemble playing which allows the various shimmering colors of Debussy's orchestral palette to be clearly delineated. Whether this is how one wants to hear this music is, of course, a personal matter. For these particular pieces, Boulez's "cool & clinical" approach works well enough to present a well-lit canvas, one which allows the active listener to venture unimpeded inside the music to revel in its inventiveness, but which might leave the passive listener emotionally unaffected. Having heard most of Boulez's Debussy, I've concluded that it probably has its place in a collection beside the likes of Martinon, Dutoit, and others; if for no other reason than for the pure sound of it all...and to hear all the notes.

CD is flawless and arrived sooner than expected.

No one can interpret French Impressionistic music like Pierre Boulez. You can hear the smallest of expressions of the orchestra as demanded by Mr. Boulez. It is almost as if the conductor had the composer sitting beside him.

Wonderful Grammy award winning recording.

Sounds great.

Già molto ben recensito in passato sulle riviste specializzate, l’ho trovata una delle migliori performance incise da Boulez. Anche la qualità sonora è di alto livello, tra le più riuscite di dg. Immancabile in una anche limitata discoteca di Debussy

On ne peut que saluer l'écoute et la maîtrise parfaite de Pierre Boulez avec un des ses orchestres favoris pour ce type de répertoire, "The cleveland orchestra" pour cette seconde lecture de ces oeuvres de Claude Debussy. C'est absolument remarquable de bout en bout. La souplesse et la finesse de l'interprétation sont plus présentes que dans la précédente lecture pour CBS, ( à l'époque) la maîtrise des plans sonores est remarquable. Un enregistrement indispensable.

Diese wunderschöne CD hat alle meine Erwartungen übertroffen. Ich möchte sie nur noch hören. Das Prélude a la près midi d'un faune gilt als eines der Hauptwerke des französischen Impressionismus und image und vor allem Printemps stimmen uns auf den baldigen Frühling ein. Ein tolles und preisgünstiges Weihnachtsgeschenk.

Spring is the world reborn according to an exuberant mediaeval Latin poem the Pervigilium Veneris - ver renatus orbis est. For me it is a little bit of a personal renewal, via this record and literally. The spring comes slowly up this way in the Pennine hills, and the time of year thou mayest in me behold is not exactly spring, but the sense of it is here. Included in the music is the Rondes de printemps, the final number in Debussy's orchestral Images, and also a welcome out-of-the-way piece his early 2-movement `symphonic suite' Printemps. The moment therefore seemed right to obtain this disc, especially as the two `springtime' works were unaccountably missing from my collection.

There was something else I wanted to renew, and it was my acquaintance with the work of Pierre Boulez. Years ago I had formed an impression of him as a martinet - very exact and therefore a natural for Stravinsky, but slightly forbidding. Whether this had anything to do with his early personal association with Stravinsky, or with his uncanny resemblance when young to Marlon Brando, or with his own very uncompromising compositions, or whether it was just something that I had been told, I don't now remember. However when I recently obtained his set of The Rite of Spring and Petrushka I was struck indeed with his exactness, but also with the beauty of the works as they came from him. Time to try him in Debussy then, and none too soon as it turns out.

You would expect top-class playing from the Cleveland Orchestra, and you would be right to. You would not be surprised if even in Debussy you heard more orchestral detail from Boulez than you usually do from other conductors, and you will not be surprised in that way here. Where you might be surprised is at the sheer beauty of the tone and phrasing, depending on what you had been led to expect. The superb balance of the orchestral tones, the strength of line without rigidity, the affection accompanying the perfection in the phrasing - all this was reminding me of someone else. Could I be listening, at long last, to a successor, the very last successor I might have been expecting - to Beecham?

That question is obviously rhetorical, and I can pay no greater compliment to any conductor. The first item on the disc is the evergreen Prelude a l'Apres-midi. How many performances of this I own I am not sure, including no mean renditions from Britten and Cantelli. However one performance has always served as my benchmark, and I expect you can guess by now whose performance that is. I am not suggesting that Boulez is any kind of clone of Beecham. He is his own man entirely, but here again is the wonderful sense of erotic languor in the heavy noonday heat. The interpretation is different in numerous respects, but what the two have in common is that marvellous atmosphere that I sense from no other accounts. Warm, soporific and all, it still reawakened in one listener a response to the music that I had not expected to experience again.

Other than Les Parfums the rest of the music is more lively, although I can never help smiling at the composer's repeated edicts against overdoing things - tres modere, modere, assez anime, moderement anime, tres modere, modere. The virtues usually to be expected from Boulez are here to satisfy expectations and more. Clarity and strength sure, but also the exquisite phrasing and heavenly orchestral tone that I was talking about above. I suppose Les Parfums might be a bit more `lent et reveur' as marked, but even here I think the composer's instruction needs a bit of interpretation, because I don't sense that his Spanish scene was entirely asleep, whatever he says.

The Images are a collection, not a set. They complement one another, and a certain variety is needed in their presentation. Rather than plod through details I shall say only that you will find exceptionally thoughtful readings in all of them. With music as great and visionary as this we can expect interpreters who are visionaries in their own right to have different things to tell us, and I like what I am being told here. The Printemps suite makes an imaginative conclusion to the concert, lightening the atmosphere, but not unduly. It seems to be to be in a slightly anonymous late romantic idiom, with just occasional hints of the great Debussy voice as we were to learn to know it. No problem for this maestro, and a welcome new acquisition for one collector at least.

The recording is from 1992, and it is a bit of a shock to realise how long ago that was now. However the quality is well up to any standards we would expect in the new millennium. The liner note is of a rather average-upmarket kind, but it contains some useful comment although in very small print. I guess that in 1992 I was not awake to everything I should have been awake to, and I welcome this springtime revival.

Good quality recordings by someone who knows these works so well.