Save the reservations, such as they are, for later; let me say at the outset that these performances are by no means cast in the shade even by the exceptionally distinguished list of selected comparisons above. I must confess that I had not expected them to be quite so good. I do not recall having heard Previn conduct Debussy before, and his recording of the Images four or five years ago was not especially well received as a performance (HMV ASD3804, 12/79; CD EMI CDC 7 47001 2, 2/84). Like Davis's though, but in a totally different way, they have the ability to make one think about these much-recorded works afresh. I suppose I had thought that the centre of Debussy's orchestra in both pieces is the woodwind and high strings, until Davis's bracing readings, of La mer especially, revealed how much of both the light and the weight of that music can be seen to be conveyed by the brass. Where Davis's Nocturnes are mistily northern and his La mer is the Baltic, Previn moves the music much closer to the Mediterranean with his warm and passionate, never histrionic but perhaps Latin concentration on the strings. They dominate the climaxes, making them grand and massive where Davis's were rather coldly gleaming, but one remembers from Previn's readings less the climaxes, splendid though they are, than the many passages of divided string writing. The delicate gradations of string sonority not long after the opening of the first nocturne for example, are both velvety and grainy—a lovely sound, and with not a trace of indulgent swooping to it; at this point both Davis and Haitink (also Philips) are cooler and more ethereal. The melody for violas and cellos at fig. 27 of "Jeux de vagues" (La mer) is another characteristic moment: more richly eloquent than Haitink, and far more so than Davis, who is more concerned with athletic impetus in this movement. The contrast is most noticeable, of course, in the third nocturne, "Sir0enes", where no conductor on record approaches Davis's hieratic mystery. Previn sees the music as almost voluptuously sensual, hardly remote at all: his sirens inhabit a warm, sunlit ocean, and they are by no means unapproachable.