Release Date: 12 January 1999
Label: Naxos - Nxc / Naxos Classics
Packaging Type: Jewel Case
No of Units: 1
Barcode: 730099429023
Genres: Classical
Composer/Series: DEBUSSY
Description
Claude Debussy (1862-1918) Piano Works, Vol. 1 Suite bergamasque (1890) Nocturne (1892) Danse bohemienne (1880) R?¬verie (1890) Mazurka (1890) 2 Arabesques (1890) Valse romantique (1890) Ballade (1890) Danse (1890) Pour le piano (1894-1901)Claude Debussy was born in 1862, the son of a shop-keeper who was later to turn his hand to other activities, with varying success. He started piano lessons at the age of seven and continued two years later, improbably enough, with Verlaine's mother-in-law, who claimed to have been a pupil of Chopin. In 1872 he entered the Conservatoire, where he abandoned the plan of becoming a virtuoso pianist, turning his principal attention to composition. In 1880, at the age of eighteen, and in the following two summers, he was employed by Tchaikovsky's patroness Nadezhda von Meck as tutor to her children and house-musician. On his return to the Conservatoire from the first of these visits abroad, he entered the class of Bizet's friend Ernest Guiraud and in 1884 won the Prix de Rome, the following year reluctantly taking up obligatory residence, according to the terms of the prize, at the Villa Medici in Rome, where he met Liszt. By 1887 he was back in Paris, winning his first significant success in 1900 with Nocturnes for orchestra and going on, two years later, to a succes de scandale with his opera Pelleas et Melisande, based on the play by Maurice Maeterlinck, a work that established his position as a composer of importance. Debussy's personal life brought some unhappiness in his first marriage in 1899 to a mannequin, Lily Texier, after an intermittent liaison of some ten years with Gabrielle Dupont. His association from 1903 with Emma Bardac, the wife of a banker and an amateur singer, led to their eventual marriage in 1908. In the summer of 1904 he had abandoned his wife, moving into an apartment with Emma Bardac, and the subsequent attempt at suicide by his wife, who had shared with him the difficulties of his early career, alienated a number of the composer's friends. His final years were darkened by the war and by cancer, the cause ofhis death in March 1918, when he left unfinished a planned series of chamber music works, describing himself patriotically as musicien fran?ºais, only three of which had been completed.The Suite bergamasque, with its very title bearing connotations of Verlaine, Fites galantes and a fin de si?¿cle nostalgia for the world of Watteau, include pieces written in 1890. The opening F major Prelude is in the immediately identifiable harmonic language of Debussy. The following Menuet travels far from the original dance and explores remoter harmonic regions than the key of A minor might immediately suggest. Clair de lune has enjoyed such popularity that it is difficult to hear it with new ears. In a mysterious F minor it suggests the moonlit 'vieux parc, solitaire et glace' of Verlaine in delicate and evocative text
Tracklisting
Dariia Lytvishko
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra; Marin Alsop
Alice Di Piazza; Basel Sinfonietta; NDR Bigband; Titus Engel
Anna Alas i Jove; Miquel Villalba
David Childs; Black Dyke Band; Nicholas Childs
Steen-Nokleberg
Kodaly Quartet
Johanneson/Reykjavik Quintet
