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Debussy Piano Music Vol 4
Danse bohémienne (c.1880) TALL POPPIES TP165 [73 mins] I met and talked with Roy Howat at a Royal Academy of Music (London) seminar yesterday. The day before, entirely by chance, I received from Australia his Debussy recordings for review! Tonight, he has a Chabrier event at RAM.
Sampling the (very) complete Debussy piano works (several discoveries in his researches, and the fullest of annotations in the liner notes) I quickly formed the view that this was Debussy as I wanted to hear it, and wished I could make (the easier) pieces sound like that.
The secret is his philosophy, which excludes "aggressiveness" and the combination of sympathetic instruments, venues and audio engineering. I will concentrate on the most recent, but have enjoyed already the Études in Vol.1, less strenuous than some others.
Vol 4 has early works, some of them very familiar to piano pupils young and old. Andras Schiff, beginning a notable series at Wigmore Hall, challenged audiences to his Chopin and his Idols recitals by deploring the commonly held assumption, that " pianos should always be black and made by Steinway". Howat recorded this completion of his integrale at Newcastle Conservatorium, on an Australian piano, Stuart & Sons No 1, presided over by Wayne Stuart himself.
The outcome is pellucid playing of the greatest transparency and sensitivity to the voicing of the music (q.v. Music Web's full appreciation) which, however, doesn't go into the question of 'horses for courses' i.e. the right piano for particular composers.
Another view of Howat's Debussy: Pour le Piano , Estampes , Preludes Bk 1 etc
Roy Howat (piano) Tall Poppies TP164
Is there a right way of playing a composer's music? And is that right way, or at least a right way, playing as the composer would have done himself? One can't take this too far; I would not want to hear Beethoven played on a piano with a few strings missing and as if the performer were deaf. Or what about Schubert, who notoriously could not play his own ‘Erlkoenig'? Or Shostakovich, who resented being a much poorer pianist than his classmate Prokofiev?
Roy Howat has a magnificent track record as a French music scholar, and as a stylist in its interpretation (Chabrier as well as Debussy). Pieces of Debussy are still being discovered, not least by Howat himself, and this disc has a musicological highlight, a first recording of Debussy's tribute to his coalman, whose generosity kept him warm in the winter of 1916-7.
Howat bravely ‘advertises' his interpretations in the booklet notes with negative as well as approbatory quotes. Reviewers speak of his playing of an etude as too steady and too plain. Ah! There is a point to this. So was Debussy's thus, as the reprint of a contemporary review tells us. Howat's playing is intentionally faithful.
But if you listen to his equivalent on this disc – the toccata finale of Pour le Piano , or the end of Estampes , that steadiness is almost risible, and it raises the suspicion that he might even be making a virtue out of necessity; he isn't choosing to drive his Ferrari in Central London, he simply has limitations of technique.
Nor, though Howat is admirably clear and intellectually transparent in his interpretations, is there any great sense of the listener being transported out of himself by touches of originality or imagination in the playing.
Ravel was notoriously scathing of amateurs, and made everything he wrote technically difficult. Debussy was more catholic, and his piano music is without doubt more accessible. But if we listen to a great pianist play Debussy - say Michelangeli, Richter, or Gieseking - we equally hear the music work not only as impressionism but also pianism. Maybe fireworks, maybe poetry. When, in that famous phrase, we hear that the piano no longer has hammers it is not because of some careful stylistic respect, but because the master pianist is a magician of the sound-world. We are exalted in ways that Howat, sadly, simply does not come near. Perhaps, as a performer, Debussy himself could not achieve this, but his interpreters must strive to.
Ying Chang
If you are seriously interested in Debussy and his piano music, get these CDs (there are four of them) from Tall Poppies, which currently doesn't have a UK distributor, and make up your own mind about these opposed responses and tell Musical Pointers?
See also MP's review of Debussy Preludes (Osborne - Hyperion)
Peter Grahame Woolf
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Debussy Piano Music Vol 3