What's Your Impression ?

The BBC Music mag cover disks infrequently use performances from their archives. These normally involve one of the orchestras but on this disk they are solo performances recorded in 1968 and 1970 by pianist Vlado Perlemuter. The title is self explanatory, Debussy and Ravel Piano Music. The Debussy works are Pour le Piano and Images ( Sets 1 and 2 ), while the featured piece by Ravel is Le Tombeau De Couperin. It seems that posterity is going to forever link the music of these two French composers, even if the similarities aren't as close as they are sometimes said to be. Together they did radically change writing for the piano, however. The two Debussy works are before and after pieces, the event they straddle being Ravel's Jeux D'eau which enabled Debussy to write with more freedom in Images and become more radical than Ravel in the end. Ravel's homage to Couperin and the baroque also straddles an event but one of much greater significance. It was begun before the start of WW1 but not completed until after and that is reflected in the work which begins playfully but ends in disillusion. Debussy's impressionistic style sometimes finds blue notes independant of any knowledge of jazz, whereas Ravel was aware of developments in the US from ragtime on. Perlemuter was a remarkable link back to Ravel. Born in what is now Lithuania, he moved to Paris in 1917 and entered the conservatoire. He was befriended by Ravel and was the first to play many of his pieces in public. His performance on this recording is very fine and he continued to give concerts until just before his 90th birthday, dying aged 98 in 2002.