Debussy Piano Works. Gordon Fergus-Thompson.

ASV (Full price) (Cassette) ZCDCA711; (CD) CDDCA711 (65 minutes: DDD).

Reverie. D'un cahier d'esquisses. Berceuse heroique. Danse. Mazurka. Nocturne. Le petit negre. Morceau de concours. La plus que lente. Hommage a Haydn. L'isle joyeuse. Page d'album. Elegie. Ballade. Valse romantique. Danse bohemienne. Masques.

The great virtue of this third volume in Fergus-Thompson's Debussy series is that it is exclusively devoted to the composer's 17 separate shorter pieces for solo piano. Naturally they turn up in rival cycles: Jacques Rouvier couples the first nine pieces as listed above with the Children's Corner Suite on a 1985 Denon recording, and includes the remaining ones, bar Page d'album and Elegie, on his later disc of Suite bergamasque and the Arabesques. Martin Jones includes all these aforementioned works plus the Images, Etudes, Estampes and Epigraphes antiques as part of his study of Debussy's piano works for Nimbus, but this is spread over three discs, whilst Zoltan Kocsis's Philips recording of the Images and Arabesques includes only six of these smaller pieces: the initial three, the Hommage a Haydn, L'isle joyeuse and Page d'album. It is only with Fergus-Thompson that we can listen to the whole lot on a single disc which plays for just on 65 minutes. Though not chronologically ordered, the programme in fact covers a span of 35 years from Debussy's first keyboard work, the Danse bohemienne of 1880 ("a charming piece but perhaps a little short" was Tchaikovsky's verdict) right through to the war years and his farewell to the piano in the brief but all-revealing Elegie of 1915. The outstanding landmark en route is of course D'un cahier d'esquisses of 1903, with its first intimations of so many impressionist masterpieces to come.

As for the playing itself, I found myself in total agreement with JM-C's assessment of this British artist (when reviewing his first Debussy volume in May this year) as a "very pensive interpreter, not content to make his mark just by applying a colouristic tonal palette. The spiritual dimension is equally important to him". And nothing in fact illustrates this better than the self-same D'un cahier d'esquisses, played with a deep inner poise as well as being most subtly shaded. My disappointments were few. But I did wonder if the tempo was slightly too fast to convey the full underlying ache of the Elegie (marked Lent et douloureux). Even in L'isle joyeuse he doesn't always allow quite enough time for detail to tell as it does from the incisive Kocsis, who also proves himself a more arrestingly dramatic point-maker, with a wider range of colour and dynamics, in the Berceuse heroique. For the most part, however, Fergus-Thompson commands unfailing respect for his musical discernment and discretion (not least as regards rubato), ensuring that even in lighter, romantic vein Debussy is never allowed to degenerate into a mere drawing-room charmer. In livelier mood I particularly enjoyed his bite and piquancy in Le petit negre (a "Golliwog's Cake-walk" reminiscence, designed in 1909 for a children's Tutor) and the Morceau de concours written for a 'guess who' competition in 1904—here I think my own guess might have been Prokofiev.

The recording is wholly acceptable, not, perhaps, as ripe toned and forward as the Kocsis/Philips sound, but certainly preferable to the over-reverberance that Martin Jones has to contend with from Nimbus.

JOC